Do you correct people?

People don't like being corrected, and they don't take the correction on board. It's a fool's errand, that won't yield any positive results, so I don't bother. You can keep correcting people until you're blue in the face, but most of the people you will be correcting just don't care.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by AliceNWondrland

I don't know about that. I can think of times when someone has corrected me or brought something to my attention and I was glad they did. Of course it's a little embarrassing, but they really just saving you from looking like a complete moron in the future. I guess it's all in the way it's done.

It has been my own experience that some people don't care about looking like a moron, whether it be now or in the future, and will invariably be displeased to be corrected, because a correction is of no value to them.

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I was just thinking about my dad, though. He mispronounces SO MANY WORDS and my mom always corrects him as nicely as she can, but he still gets so mad. Also, he keeps mispronouncing the same words even after she has corrected him, so it's a total waste of time on her part. It's kind of funny.

Your father sounds exactly like the kind of person who has discouraged me from ever offering corrections. I think it would be nice if we lived in a world where people generally were well-disposed to being corrected, and in which everyone strove to improve their grammar, but that's certainly not been the case in the majority of my experience.

Personally, I would prefer to be corrected when I make a mistake, especially if it is a factual error rather than a grammatical or syntactic mis-step. It's embarrassing, but it can add to my knowledge, or save me from future embarrassment, as you said. I just happen to find that I'm in a minority.

There's nowhere I can't reach.