God bless pedants.

Picture pinched from the BBC homepage because this 'literally' thing one of my special bugbears.

You can rely on certain factions of the British public to get very hot under the collar about language. And I for one love them for it.

The BBC has listed 20 of the top language foibles its readers have griped about. Here's the short version, with notes:

1. Of for have, as in 'I could of killed him...'
2. For free, which is the one my father-in-law always gets excited about.
   
3. 12pm, which is splendidly picky. It doesn't exist, says the reader, and he's right, really.
4. Effect vs Affect
5. The grocer's apostrophe, of course. (Apple's, Banana's, etc.)
6. I vs Me, which is a favourite. (All you have to do is take out the other person. Should it be 'They made tea for Mike and I'? No, because you'd never say, 'They made tea for I.')
7. Yourself or myself instead of you or me. It makes this chap's blood boil. How marvellous.
8. None of them are vs None of them is. Like the reader, I thought the latter was correct, because 'none'='no one'. The BBC quotes Fowler to prove us both wrong. You're always learning in this game.
9. Another classic: different to (should be from) and compared to (should be with). Again, the BBC notes that Fowler is against this.
10. A wonderfully arcane argument against the common meaning of 'open fire'.
11. The literally thing, which literally makes my blood boil.
12. The whole It's vs Its conundrum. It's really not that hard.
    
13. They're / Their / There and To / Two / Too, which are driving a secondary school teacher to despair, God help us.
14. Due to instead of owing to. 'But then,' says the contributor candidly, 'I'm a pedant.'
15. Apparently children are increasingly saying lend instead of borrow. ('Can I lend your pencil?')
16. Amount of people instead of number of people. The BBC again calls on Fowler, and the argument, as with less and fewer, that you use amount for an uncountable mass, like gravy or sand, and number for countable things like coins or houses. But surely 'people' are countable, at least in principle? I agree with the reader, it should be a number of people, as it should be fewer people.
17. By foot instead of on foot. Blimey.
18. Another of the ones that gets me: singular nouns with plural verbs. So 'The team are ready', 'The audience get restless' or 'The group stand on stage'. Is, gets, stands!
19. One chap is struggling with prepositions at the ends of sentences. ('This is the town I went to,' or 'They're at the table I sat at.') This always seems to me an elegance question. If it sounds ugly the 'correct' way, don't 'correct' it. As Churchill apparently said, when corrected in this way, 'This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.'
20. Stadiums instead of stadia.
    

Staggeringly, none of them is/are about And at the start of a sentence. Perhaps my mailer has done the trick.