Pet peeves

Y'know what bugs me? "Problem is." As in, "Problem is, I didn't have two clean socks." (or whatever). That's completely ungrammatical. I mean, if you don't talk like that, you shouldn't write like that, and I've never heard anyone say "Problem is" at the beginning of a sentence like that, with the comma and everything. I'd say, "The problem is that I didn't have two clean socks." Why do people insist on leaving out the article and the that and thinking that putting in a comma makes it OK? It doesn't, people -- you're just making yourself look stupid.

Another often-encountered irritant: "some." As in, "The move will affect some 90 people." Some 90 people? Huh? Either it affects 90 people, or it just affects some people, of an indeterminate amount. It'd be much clearer to say "The move will affect around 90 people." How many people? Around 90. Maybe even about 90. But not "some 90." That just sounds stupid.

One more thing that's driving me nuts is the creep of "got/get" into writing. As in, "The complex will get built in the spring." Get built? It will just get built, somehow, actively go out and get itself built, or something? No, no it won't. "The complex will be built in the spring." Built is the verb, "will be" is the extra bit indicating the tense. Nowhere in a grammar book will you find "will get" in that role, nor will you find "got" replacing "was." ("It got built last year"? -- no, it was built.) More and more people are saying got/get where a simple form of the verb "to be" is called for, and that's bad enough, but do we have to write as poorly as we speak?

Obviously, I'm bored tonight... can you tell? :-P