I’ve been keeping a log in recent months of English language errors that get up my nose. If I see a glaring mistake once, I write it off as a mistake. But if I see it more than once, I begin to worry that it’s a trend. Here are some examples of things that I am seeing with alarming frequency:
The word supposably. It was cute coming out of the mouth of the Boston-Irish accountant at the Archdiocese when I temped there oh-so-many-years ago. But it’s really not a word, and if you’re not Maureen McCarthy, don’t think about using it.
I should of turned left at Albuquerque. I know how this one gets started; it’s how the contraction “should’ve” sounds. But “should’ve” is short for “should have,” not “should of.”
For once and for all. I saw this in the Jerusalem Post a couple of months ago and wrote it off as one of the Post‘s many errors. Then it turned up in Daniel Gordis’s newest book, Saving Israel. The expression is “once and for all.” Please make a note of it.
For all intensive purposes. Someone please tell me what an “intensive purpose” is. I’m dying to know. (The correct expression is “for all intents and purposes.”)
Fleeing the coop. Chickens “fly the coop.” But perhaps if they come from a particularly dysfunctional coop, I suppose one could say they “flee.”
In general, I thought the team of Jackson, Boyens and Walsh did an excellent job on the screenplay for The Lord of the Rings. But I’ve always been bothered by the weird line they give 
Elrond in his speech about how the walls of evil are closing in on the forces of good: “Our list of allies grows thin.” I loved the consonance between “list” and “thin” (as, I imagine, did they) but it doesn’t make any sense. Lists grow short, not thin.
$300 million dollars. I did this one myself recently. REDUNDANT!
Ruthie Blum Leibowitz wrote in the Post recently: “Now is the time for the Israeli and American media to step up to the plate and further, for once and for all, the cause of genuine freedom fighters, as opposed to those who are misrepresented as such by themselves and by their Western apologists, among them a large portion of the press.” Nudge nudge. Psssst! Copy editor? Yeah, you. No sleepin’ on the job.
“While there is no hard-clad prescription to deal with such a religiously convoluted reality.” Fool-proof? I’ve heard of hard-clad rules, and I think the Monitor and the Merrimack were pretty hard-clad. But prescriptions are more delicate things. I don’t think hard-clad describes them at all well.
“Did she not experience terrible shame in having to drivel in the face of her rabbi?” This was written about a woman whose rabbi told her to spit in his face to save her marriage. (It’s a long story.) I suspect the writer of this sentence meant “dribble,” but even that doesn’t adequately describe the necessary propulsive, spraying action of spitting. If he had instructed her to blather on about some nonsense to him, THAT would have been drivel.
If I were a fourth-grade teacher and saw these errors, I would conclude that the writers of this stuff were about where they should be. But I would bet a pound to a penny that these writers all worked their way well past fourth grade. (Besides, the errors of fourth graders are much cuter, as indicated by those cute emails that circulate where the kids write about how Magellan circumcised the world with a giant clipper.) Sigh. The state of the English language these days–and even worse, the state of the English language user.
Shimshonit 
The fourth graders’ mistakes are cute! Did you hear the one about how Lincoln was born in a log cabin built with his own two hands, after his mother died in infancy?