Over the years, as one listens to people talking, a surprising realization occurs: It is possible to hear the American language change before your very ears.

Take “bring” and “take.” Or bring “bring” and “take,” because the difference in meaning between those two words is weakening. “To bring” means to have someone carry something or accompany someone else to the place where you are. “To take” means to carry something away. The distinction now seems to be missed by many people.  One commonly hears and reads such sentences as “Bring your back pack to school.” If the teacher is the speaker, that’s okay, since the backpack will be coming toward him or her. But the parent should use the word “take.”

If you studied a foreign language, the difference in the two words was probably reinforced. Remember the verbs “amener” and “emmener,” all you French students? And “apporter” and “emporter?”

Confusing bring and take is the language quirk that bothers me the most. But when I polled some friends, they had other usage nits to pick. For example, they said the most grating language habit they heard frequently was the tendency for the preposition “of” to disappear after certain verbs. It was startling recently to hear Barbara Walters, who should know better, omit the “of” when she explained on a television program that a person “graduated high school.” There was a time when some people insisted that the phrase was “was graduated from high school.” Then it became acceptable to say, “He graduated from high school.”

Now the verbs “shop” and “babysit” have joined “graduated” in losing their prepositions. Did “shop” lose its “at” when Bradlee’s, that long-ago bankrupt discount store, began running ads in the 1980s or ‘90s directing us to “Shop Bradlee’s?” At first it seemed as if the lost “at” was a marketing ploy to make potential customers’ anticipation more intense, as if they were going to be able to dig into the goods rather than just look at them. But the practice spread, and now stores urge listeners to “shop Macy’s” or “shop us last.” But maybe all this is just bad usage.

I first heard the dropped preposition with the Bradlee’s ad, so I thought it could be only a New England phenomenon. Now that Barbara Walters, who hasn’t lived in New England for decades, is dropping the preposition, I’ll assume the bad phrasing is a national problem.

“Were,” when it refers to a possibility, or more formally, when it is used in the subjunctive, is also losing ground. It remains in the song, “If I Were a Carpenter and You Were a Lady,” but many people now say, “If I was.” Those who were subjected to strict rules about this when they were young can’t get used to this new way of phrasing these possibilities.

Another common mistake that rankles the folks I polled was the use of the word “ironic.” For example, “It’s ironic that we met at the Red Sox game.” No. Unless meeting at the Red Sox game is the reverse of what you expected, you mean it was coincidental, not ironic.

A friend of mine who works at Harvard, where you’d think they would know better, complains about often hearing the pronoun “me” used in the wrong part of the sentence. People say, “Me and my brother are going to the Red Sox game,” when they should use the subject pronoun, “I”, and place it after “my brother,” as in “my brother and I”. The opposite mistake is also grating—using “I” as an object pronoun, as in the sentence “He gave my brother and I tickets to the Red Sox game.”

Good journalists and other writers depend on style books put out by the AP or the University of Chicago to guide their writing. But two books designed for the general public a few years ago are most enjoyable and helpful to read about language usage and punctuation in written language. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” by Lynne Truss zestily shows how meaning changes depending on the use of the comma and other marks. “Woe is I” by Patricia T. O’Connor is another easy read toward better English.

My favorite word usage mistake occurred several years ago when a neighbor in a dispute with another neighbor confused a legal term. Neighbor A was a bit peculiar, and Neighbor B called him “the little pervert.” I don’t know if he was a pervert, but he was not a pleasant man. When Neighbor A erected a fence at the end of the walkway shared by abutters, Neighbor B sued him, demanding that he remove the fence. Neighbor B won.

Neighbor A knocked at my door, sputtering with rage. He Since Barbara Walters dropping the preposition, I’ll assume the bad phrasing is a national phenomenon. had not removed the fence. He asked if I knew that Neighbor B had hired workmen to do the job. The fence was being taken down at that moment.

I told him I knew about the matter, and I supported Neighbor B. Neighbor A was even more furious. “I’m trying to take that by eminent domain,” he yelled.

“You mean adverse possession,” I corrected him. And then I closed the door—quickly and tightly. Shortly thereafter, he moved. We’ve not heard from him again.