WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

I like to think I'm a pretty easy going guy, but there are a few things that twist my poodle in a knot.

Like writers getting stuff wrong. Stuff they could just as easily get right, if they were sufficiently motivated.

For instance, I'm torqued by writers who put the word bicep in their books and stories. And I'm royally annoyed by the publishers who let it go. (Assuming there are publishers involved.)

There is no such word as bicep.

Idiots think there is because the word they want to use, biceps, ends in an s and therefore must be plural. When they want to call attention to just one of those muscles—say to point out a nasty tattoo on the upper part of the villain's left arm—they chop off the s and go their merry way.

And editors let them do it!

Has no one ever looked that word up? Biceps is the name for a muscle in the front of the upper arm. (The one in the back is called the triceps.) Biceps comes from Latin and means "two heads," because that's how the muscle is attached at the shoulder. The s comes from the plural of these attach points (the heads), not the muscle itself.

Because just one of those muscles (most of us have two, one for either arm) is properly called a biceps, you make it plural in the familiar way: two bicepses. The same logic applies to triceps (plural: tricepses) and (referring to the muscle at the front of the leg) quadriceps (plural: quadricepses).

Some dictionaries allow the word biceps to cover both singular and plural uses. Those dictionaries are what I like to call wrong.

Another word people get wrong is lie (and I don't mean falsehood). Folks hardly ever lie down anymore. They lay down. Television writers get this one wrong just about 100% of the time.

"Go lay down!" "He was just laying there!" "I gotta lay down for a minute." Et cetera, as well as ad nauseam.

If you get your ear for language from American television, you'll be getting it wrong.

There's a major difference between lie and lay. Lay is a transitive verb that requires an object. "Lay the gun down." Or, tricky: "Now I lay me down to sleep."

You lie down,see? But you could also lay yourself down—becoming the object of your action.

And it certainly doesn't help that the past tense of lie is lay. "I lay down for an hour, but couldn't get to sleep."

Another perfectly good word is often avoided: me. There's a strong tendency to substitute the word I.

Folks say: "Bob gave Tony and I a ride to the park." Or: "Just between you and I, this movie stinks!"

In both cases, the word me should have been used instead of I.

One way of ferreting it out is to remove the extra individual in the sentence and see how it sounds: "Bob gave [Tony and] I a ride to the park." Clearly it should be: "Tony gave me a ride to the park."

In the second case, the word between is a preposition, and the pronouns following are the objects of that preposition. Objects need to be in the objective case. That means him, her, and me.

In my theory, the affectation of avoiding the word me comes from getting corrected early in life. Someone asks who's there, and you say, "It's me."

Then some grammar-Nazi corrects you: "Wrong! It's I!"

Now, every time you want to use the word me, you panic and substitute I—avoiding the colloquial in order to be wrong for real.

Apparently "It's I" is correct, but I have no problem with "It's me." Even the French say, "C'est moi," not "C'est je."

Forms of the verb to be can be reversed to test for the correct usage. "It's I" reverses to "I am it." "Me am it" doesn't work. Even so, "It's me" seems more natural than "It's I," which sounds like something you'd say with your pinkie finger extended.

If the word is wasn't required to allow sentences to be reversible, it would made sense to say me is the object of is. This is certainly true of other verbs: "Bob shot me." Perfectly correct. Reversing this sentence gets you "Me shot Bob" and would call for a Tarzan-talk adjustment: "I shot Bob."

Reversing again brings out "Bob shot I." Wrong, obviously.

So, it's only the trumped-up ability of forms of the verb to be that gets this special (and somewhat illogical) treatment. Maybe it's time we revoked those privileges.

Another "mistake" I have little or no problem with is split infinitives. I try not to, but I won't tie a sentence in a knot to avoid one that sounds natural.

Fiction writers might want to save grammatical correctness for narrative text, allowing characters to make what mistakes they want in their dialogue.

That makes sense, but often the narrative of a book is slanted toward the character whose viewpoint is used. In this case, I suppose the text can skew toward the illiterate (if that's how you want to portray your character). It's a judgement call to see how how close to unreadable you want to go.

Not too close, I would think. By definition, the truly unreadable goes unread.

(Parts of Finnegans Wake are fun to read, but a little goes a very, very long way. I would never claim to have read that thing, but I guess I'm okay with it existing, almost completely unread, on my shelf.)

Some colloquialisms do annoy me. Using alright for all right, for instance. I suppose in dialogue aw-right is okay. Or aw-ight. Though some might take offense. And you run the risk of falling into dialect, which is a pit containing some sharp-ass rocks at the bottom.

Often a mistake has to be heard to be detected.

Almost everybody says "fortay" when they use the word forte. (It's properly pronounced "fort.")

(I am of course referring to the French word meaning "the thing I do best." The Italian word forte is pronounced "fortay". It's mostly used as an instruction in music. A musician who enjoys playing loudly may say, "Forte is my forte." Pronounced: "Fortay" is my "fort".)

Some people say "hee-nous" for heinous ("hay-nous").

On The Big Bang Theory, Dr. Sheldon Cooper says "coy-tus" for coitus. It's properly pronounced "co-EE-tus" or "CO-i-tus." (In the second case, think of the i as a schwa.)

People don't get that the past tense of spay is spayed. They tend to add an additional -ed to the word: "spay-ded."

People say mano-a-mano and think it means man-to-man. It literally means hand-to-hand. (In Italian, the phrase translates as "little by little.")

People use the word theory when they should be saying hypothesis.

A hypothesis (or do I mean "an hypothesis"?) is a well-thought out statement that explains the current information about a situation, but hasn't been proved correct by experiment (though it should suggest methods of experimental proof). A theory, in science, is the hypothesis all shined up and encrusted with ingenious demonstrations. It will do until new information comes along, often as a result of newly invented observational instruments.

(The Theory of Evolution is not some wild-ass guess, which is what most people mean by theory. "Is that your theory, Einstein?")

Sometimes people get things wrong by trying to ingratiate themselves. On TV news, they'll say some geezer is "ninety-nine years young." They don't want to offend anyone who thinks they just got called "old."

(The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had the bizarre notion that lawyers who stood before him in court and used contractions in their arguments were trying to "buddy-up" to him by this informality.)

Not a mistake, I suppose, but I notice on TV the avoidance of fractions. Instead of saying something is "one forth" of something else, they'll say it's "four times less" than the other thing. Are they really worried the average American can't decode the words "one fourth" because "fractions are hard!"

Another mistake that does annoy me a bit: Folks mixing up less and fewer. Use fewer when the thing referred to can be counted. "Less time" but "fewer hours." "Less money" but "fewer dollars."

Saying "fewer time" sounds wrong, obviously, but "less hours" doesn't sound that wrong. ("After the reorganization I have less hours at work.") It is, nevertheless, wrong.

The words amount and number work by the same rules as less and fewer. "A great number of people had gathered." "A vast amount of water flowed out of the spillway."

And speaking of less, folks say they "could care less" when they mean they "could not care less." Unfortunately, this one may have passed into the protected territory of the colloquial, where both versions have equal validity.

Note, however, this is not a case of literal equivalency, like flammable and inflammable, or raveled and unraveled.

Another pair of words often abused: farther and further. Farther ought to refer to physical distance. Further indicates psychological distance. (NB: I've read that in Great Britain and the Commonwealth nations, further is preferred for both senses.)

Google the phrase "common mistakes in English" for a great many other errors you'll want to avoid. I'm just noting here the ones that grate on my ear nearly every day.

If you're going to publish independently—and are proceeding without a professional editor—you owe it to yourself to get it right most of the time. Readers have been known to throw books across the room.

Having your book on an expensive electronic reader may not protect you from that precipitous action. In fact, your outraged readers may want to sue you for damages.

(Nobody said the literary life would be easy.)

Perhaps you have your own pet peeves. Feel free to comment.

(For instance, the expression "pet peeve" always brings to my mind the image of a puppy throwing up. But that's just me, right?)