"Grammar....It's Not Really The Past Tense of That Music Business Award..."

We'll be right back with more endless, mindless blather about the government shutdown, wild bunch biker gangs and Miley Cyrus but, first, let's talk a little irony.

We are living in the year 2013.

There are, at this writing, accounting for the various technologies, softwares, social media, etc., available to us at this time, approximately seventy gazillion ways for us to communicate with one another on a minute by minute basis.

And yet, ironically, our ability to communicate correctly continues to hover somewhere around the elementary school level.

To wit, and on behalf of those dedicated educators who continue their valiant efforts to hone the grammatical skills of a generation growing up in an LOL OMG WTF culture, we present "the eight most common mistakes made in the modern day use of grammar."

1. Affect vs. effect. The easiest way to remember the difference between the two is that "affect" means "to influence." So if you're going to influence something, you will affect it. If it's the result of something, it's an effect.
2. Impact. Impact is a noun, not a verb. A plane can crash on impact. You can have an impact on something. But you cannot impact something. (When you are tempted to use "impact" as a verb, use "affect" instead; see #1.)
3. Their, they're and there. You'd think everyone would have learned this rule in fourth grade, but it's a very common mistake. Use "there" when referring to a location, "their" to indicate possession, and "they're" when you mean to say "they are."
4. Care less. The dismissive "I could care less" is incorrect. If you could care less about it, then you're saying you could care less about the topic, and you've lost the impact you meant to have. To use this phrase correctly, insert the word "not" after the word "could," as in, "I could not care less."
5. Irregardless. This word doesn't exist. The word you should use is "regardless."
6. Your and you're. Another mistake you'll often see in people's social media profiles or other content they create is the incorrect us of "your" and "you're." If you mean to say "you are," the correct word is "you're." Use "your" when referring to something that belongs to "you," as in "your business."
7. Fewer vs. less. Another common mistake, "less" refers to quantity and "fewer" to a number. For instance, Facebook has fewer than 5,000 employees, but I got less sleep than you last night.
8. Quotation marks. Among the great debates, people ask all the time whether or not punctuation belongs inside or outside of quotation marks. Let's set the record straight. The period and the comma always go inside quotation marks. The dash, the semicolon, the exclamation mark and the question mark go inside when they apply to the quoted matter (if it's not the entire sentence) but outside when they apply to the whole sentence.

It should be noted, and this might be, but bet the farm its not, a coincidence, that these all too common grammar glitches tend to show up most often in certain, specific demographics.

1.  Middle aged to senior aged Americans who, for one reason or another, never had, or never took advantage of, educational opportunities beyond, say, sixth or seventh grade.

2.  Young Americans who can name each and every member or the Jenner/Kardashian family, flawlessly recite current sales figures on Grand Theft Auto 5 and who are incensed that the Duck Dynasty folks continue to be overlooked by the Kennedy Center Honors folks but who couldn't correctly conjugate a verb if you put their own legally owned by Constitutional guarantee AR-15 to their heads.

3.  Americans across the complete spectrum of age who cannot use the word Obama in a sentence without including the word, or some variation of the word, "impeach".

4.  Morons.

Which, come to think of it, pretty much functions as an "all of the above" categorization.

Irregardless of the affect that bad grammar has on our overall presentations, one can easily see how poor communication skills can impact our daily lives.

And though most people could care less as long as Khloe and Lamar patch things up, Grand Theft Auto 6 rolls out on schedule and Uncle Si and Jace and company eventually get their duck due, it needs be said and resaid that the less mistakes we make in our day to day interactions with each other, the fewer our frustrations with each other can ideally be.

Their you have it.

Your welcome.