Being an English major, I spend a lot of time thinking about the English language (duh). And over the course of my pursuit of perfect grammar, I've had several encounters with little quirks in the system that, quite frankly, drive me insane.
A good example of this is the words, protein, caffeine, either, and neither, which don't follow any of the rules. You know the i before e except after c unless it says a as in neighbor and weigh thing? Yeah, that doesn't apply here. Jerks. If it did, then we would spell those words as, protien, caffiene, iether, and niether. Or we would say then protane, caffane, aether, and naether. However, both of those solutions sound stupid and would be difficult to implement so we keep things the way they are.
However, I thought of one this morning that bothers me even more: describing how something smells.
Quick grammar lesson: when you describe how something is, you use an adverb instead of an adjective. Adjectives describe what things are like, while adverbs describe how things are. So when someone asks how you are, you really should say well instead of good, because well is an adverb and good is an adjective and you're describing how you are, not what you are. Usually adverbs end in -ly (deliciously, beautifully, horribly, etc.), but some (like well), don't.
So anyways, you're not supposed to use adjectives to describe how something smells, but if you don't, it sounds incredibly strange. You don't tell someone that the smell well, or terribly, you tell them they smell good or bad. It just flows better. It bothers me that if I followed the actual rules on speaking properly on this one, that I would end up sounding moronic.
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