Comment by TurkTurkleton
4 days ago
Hi, American here and "how" + "to look like" makes my teeth itch. However, people generally find grammar corrections to be needlessly pedantic when the erroneous grammar does not impede comprehension, so I've personally decided to choose my grammatical battles and simply fume about people talking about "how something looks like" in private instead.
I generally also choose to keep such complaints private, and I'm not sure what whim motivated me to speak up this time. Rather to my surprise, this trivial gripe has been voted up more than almost anything else I've written here over the last sixteen years. It would seem that there actually is, in some contexts, somehow, at least some appetite for grammatical pedantry!
Language is tricky. One of the trickiest things! There's so much tied up in it, objective and subjective. It's a simple tool. It's an academic object. It's a well-defined spec. It's a living ambiguous blob. But it's also one of the biggest pieces of one's culture. There's a reason the French are so possessive of their language where it lives in cultural exclaves. There's a reason the Irish have laws to keep their native language alive.
You're writing in a forum whose members are known to be notoriously pedantic. You're in good company!
I can see at least two grammatical errors in your first two sentences. Imagine being a grammar pedant and missing a comma before the conjunction linking two independent clauses.