"Like fingernails on a chalkboard" is the stock, if unimaginative, reaction to a nonstandard usage: "irregardless," "literally" used figuratively, "laid" for "lay," &c. (I did see something more original yesterday: "like chewing on aluminum foil.")
No doubt my barbarous upbringing in rural Kentucky accounts for my brute insensitivity to the nuances of language, but I can't say that any of these particularly distress me. Oh, I clean them up in texts while rooting out cliches, excising the padding, and making reporters' subjects and verbs agree. But I don't have to go lie in a dark room with a cold cloth on my forehead after I encounter them.
Others, however, suffer. Now, I recall my grandmother struggling as arthritis gripped her fingers, my mother trying to cook and serve food as the tremors from her Parkinsonism increased, my father laboring to breathe during the late stages of congestive heart failure.* But those were mere physical pains, not to be compared to the exquisite torture of encountering spoken or written colloquial American English.
That pain is not merely personal, either. It is linked to broader concerns, to trembling for the future of the English language itself, assailed by uneducated, uncouth corrupters; for the future of a culture rapidly decaying into barbarism, defended only by a few scattered stalwarts huddled in their hilltop strongholds.
Or could this be—I hesitate even to speculate—posturing? Exaggerating the importance of minor solecisms to enhance one's status? Indulging in we-fall-upon-the-thorns-of-life-we-bleed, princess-and-the-pea pretension to inflate the significance of acquaintance with standard grammar and usage?
I have racked my brain and searched my heart for something to say to these suffering souls. And it is this:
Come off it.
*Did you notice that I omitted the possessives with the participles, or did they just slip past you?