Today is National Grammar Day!

With Pi Day just around the corner, we didn’t think March could get any more exciting, until we remembered that March 4 is National Grammar Day.

Now, some blogs would use this holiday to draw attention to their grammar pet peeves (your vs. you’re, etc.), but Fing Bing isn’t like that. Instead, let’s take a look at some other people’s pet peeves that have become correct through common usage:

• A preposition is a fine word to end a sentence with. Although some old fogies may not agree, ending a sentence with a preposition is much preferred to awkwardly restructuring your words. Consider Winston Churchill’s famous line: From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up which I will not put.
• Passive sentences have proven themselves useful. It’s true, if you’re describing a simple scene, it usually makes more sentence to say The dog chased the ball, etc., as opposed to The ball was chased by the dog. But the passive voice is very valuable, especially when you don’t know who performed the action of the sentence: Harry Potter was translated into a number of different languages.
• It’s okay to feel nauseous, especially if you’ve had a few too many. The last thing you need to hear when you’re about to ralph is “No, you feel nauseated.” Conventionally, nauseated has been used to describe a person who feels ill, while nauseous is the thing that caused said feeling. But, through common usage, nauseous can describe both cause and effect.

Our list was inspired by Motivated Grammar. Have a good National Grammar Day!