Error-Proof
Some people are annoyed by the errors they find in others’ choice of grammar or selection of vocabulary. To these guardians of language, there are few more egregious slip-ups (slips-up?) than to leave a participle dangling, end a sentence with a preposition or (heaven forfend) utilize an inflectional, rather than a periphrastic, comparative (stupider, say, instead of more stupid). Those who have pet peeves about language have chosen their domain of umbrage well, since it is inevitable that people will continue to make errors in speech and writing, and so there will always be something to be offended by, which can be very comforting.
And what of the rest of us, we who are not of the opinion that using verbal nouns and the like is akin to kicking an elderly lady off the bus — what do we have to be annoyed by? We can be annoyed by those people who insist on correcting our use of the English language. My aim here, however, is not to illustrate how to be annoyed by those who insist on correcting your language (that will come naturally) but rather to provide a guide for how to make them go away.