Let's Get Grammar-y and Shit

Simple one first.

Deadline
The closing date. The submission date. The last moment for you to do something. Hence 'dead'. Please don't misuse this again.

Dateline
That city/date combination at the beginning of news reports. Ever heard of those? No? Well, you know those annoying toilet paper things your parents waste RM1.00 on every day to read pointless stuff on? It's the stuff printed on that thing. And in the days before news was reported by jane24 or @ahmadT (follow me!) who could be anywhere in the world sitting smugly with a cup of coffee watching a Skype feed of a riot instead of being on-site, real news was reported by a real person with the city's name and reporting date stamp at the beginning. The city's name would all be in capital letters, so you'd have to be quite oblivious (or stupid, really) to not notice this. It sort of goes like this.

KUALA LUMPUR, DEC 17---Yours truly attended Ruth Sahanaya's 25th anniversary concert tonight...

In case you still couldn't notice it, I made it bold, underlined it, italicised it, and even used a different font. Here it is again, unchanged, for your comparison.

KUALA LUMPUR, DEC 17---Yours truly attended Ruth Sahanaya's 25th anniversary concert tonight...

Simple. Also, don't confuse this with the International Date Line, which is the line that separates one day from another, somewhere near Samoa. Crossing this line westward sends you one day forward; eastward sends you one day back.

Now here's an interesting one: Why is it never a "ten-years plan"?

I honestly don't know what the rule is called but I should have this line in bold so you'll know this is the next thing
As a noun (if you don't know what that is, please print this page if you can, crumple it up, and go fuck yourself), numbers stick to the normal rule. No hyphens. Pluralise if it's more than one. Simple. It gets complicated when you use numbers to describe something, like a 'ten-year plan'.

She is eighteen years old.
That's her twenty-year-old brother.

For some reason, in the second case, all three words (or however many it takes to form the phrase) are joined together to form an adjective of sorts. And for some godforsaken reason, you don't have to pluralise--nay, you are forbidden from pluralising! (I did the whole font, underline, bold thing again, so you know I mean business).

Another common misconception of the need for a hyphen would be in the word 'long-term'. Or was that 'long term'? See what I did there? Ha! Anyway, same thing as above, really.

Results will be noticeable in the long term.
This is why it's a called long-term programme.

Rules for hyphenation go much deeper than this, but you'll rarely use it anyway, so I can't be bothered. Apparently adjectivising (is that even a word?) any word that has an -ed suffix requires a hyphen. Hot-headed, for one. But of course we couldn't give a rat's ass, so we can cross that bridge when we get there.

And how do we substitute?

Substitute Crisco for butter
Does that mean I'm using Crisco instead of butter? Or vice versa? Sometimes it sounds like the former is right. Sometimes, it's the latter.

It's the former. You substitute something new/better for something old/not as good. But you change something old/broken for something new/better. So be careful when using "substitute". As a follower of soccerball, I--just as many others--have been corrupted by years of ill-informed punditry and commentary about who goes off the field and is replaced by who.

Substitute A for B: A comes on for B
Substitute A with/by B: B comes on for A
Change A for B: B comes on for A
Replace A with B: B comes on for A

Next up, the difference 'a' makes.

A few & Few
Let's take this sentence as an example:

We've had (a) few problems.

Is that a complaint or is that brushing it off in a rather 'meh' manner? Let's see, then.

"A few" sort of means "many" but with a slight extra to it, as if there were more than is desired, but toned down. It's just an annoyingly modest way of saying "many" without explicitly saying it. Expanded, this sentence can sound more positive or negative, depending on the context:

We've had a few problems but we're fine.
We've had a few problems so we're in the shit.

Here, the number of problems is more than the speaker would wish. There emphasis on the amount of problems, but the speaker is holding back to be modest. Try substituting "many" for "a few" (hey, we're already applying shit we learned!).

The opposite is true for "few" (without the preceding 'a'); the connotation to this is that the number is less than is desired. Here's the sentence, expanded:

We've had few problems--it's okay, really.

In this case, the number is so small it's negligible. Here's an easy tip to help you out. Just add "quite" and/or "very" and it'll all make sense.

We've had quite a few problems but we're fine.
We've had very few problems--it's nice, really.

This also sometimes applies to "(a) little", by the way.

Why is it like this? Well, I suppose these are like 'its' and 'it's'. It could all have been much less ambiguous. It'd surely have saved millions of teachers having to remind their kids a bajillion times "Apostrophe 'it's', only for 'it is'! Non-apostrophe 'its', only for self reference!"

A similar case is evident in Bahasa Melayu (or Bahasa Malaysia, who gives a shit anymore?) by having the passive voice prefix di- and having the preposition (kata sendi) di. A million signboards out there are wrongwrongwrong! because the geniuses entrusted with this task don't know the difference: Di Larang Buang Sampah; Dapatkan Disini!

But to be fair, way back in the days when people started to actually give a shit about all these rules, they probably weren't as well connected or as well informed as we are now; many must not have gotten the memo. They probably only had candlelight at night--or in the day, if they lived in caves. I don't know. Also, back then people in different areas would obviously have very different understandings (think British-American spelling discrepancy). Yet look at what they've done. Credit to them--no, bow down, doff your cap, worship and peluk-cium them if possible--for what they accomplished. We have so much these days--the internet, the smart-ass phones, the fancy computers, Google and all that jazz (and also all that jizz, badum-pish!)--but honestly, how many times have you Googled about language or grammar? I did some these past two weeks, but only because of work (Ampersand or 'and'? To hyphen or not?). Nowadays, despite having all the help we can get, we've only sped up the fucking up of all their effort.

It's sad, really.