Language fails that make you angry

nazarbaz

Je parle anglais comme une vache espagnole... I talk english like a spanish cow, would say the french... If you ever meet my posts and you find my wording and my grammatical structures wrong or wierd, this is normal... I learned it trying to decipher Frank Zappa lyrics and I'm still learning... The cult of "correctness" has its adverse effects though... In France, they have a very old institution in charge of defending the right "usage" of language, l'Académie française... An assembly of very old writers and intellectuals who earn very confortable wages for it... They are called the immortals and they issue a volume of their dictionary once every 10 years or so... Still stuck on the letter M or N after decades of work... Sweet or mad people, I don't know...

Fredrik

How would you rewrite "I screwed up"?

Andre

FreeMitya

"I made a mistake." "Screwed" in that context is slang anyway and would not be used in formal writing. "I messed up" could also be revised to "I made a mistake," or one could say "I made a mess of this." You might consider these to be reaches, but there is no difference in meaning.