askchapo

"Maybe if society had morals there wouldn't be so many minorities in prison."

Funny enough, that's correct, just not in the way the person probably intended. The carceral state and institutional racism are indeed signs of a deeply immoral society.

English had a big French spelling phase, so a bunch of our words have entirely different phonetic sounds vs their spelling. I constantly mess this up. Go ahead, make me spell bourgoise or bureacracy the first time. Nope failed again! Conscious/Conscience are definitely in that category.

For me I'm not sure if Math or Maths are correct

use the fucking oxford comma you godforsaken cretins

"could care less"

THIS

"it means the same thing!" they say

IF COULD CARE LESS MEANS THE SAME AS COULD NOT CARE LESS THEN THE WORD "NOT" IS ENTIRELY MEANINGLESS

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The fact 99% of people use the word "logical" to mean "reasonable" because they literally don't know what logic is.

I am irrationally irritated when people describe something as "addicting" rather than "addictive". I'm not even sure it's technically incorrect, and language is a fluid thing so this shouldn't irritate me. But I still have to consciously tell myself to not be annoyed by it.

I really hate the misuse of the word "pretentious." A lot of people use it to mean something like "pompous" when it's root is "pretense." It's only pretentious if someone is dissembling about how much they know about something. If someone actually knows as much about a subject as the appear to then it doesn't matter how annoying they are, it's still not pretentious.

And that's my very specific pet peeve. And having this opinion is itself extremely annoying, but it's still not pretentious goddamnit

Corpo-speak e-mails from bloviating, self-important middle managers who regurgitate such turns of phrase as "at this time" and/or "in a timely manor [sic]" make my eye twitch. I can overlook a lot of the "synergizing our thought leaders with operational tempo" jargon salad, but the aforementioned phrases trigger my fight-or-flight response, probably because they reek of petty tyrant small business night manager mentality and bring me back to the headspace of dealing with bosses like that when I was a kid.

I also once had to work with an IT project manager who insisted on pronouncing the word "processes" as if it had a long-E vowel sound in the plural ("pro-cess-eez"). It would derail my train of thought every fucking time.

Also also once had a direct supervisor who would throw around "irregardless" almost daily.

When Enlightened Centrists whine about someone having an agenda or a narrative.

"_ and I" hypercorrection, or maybe reanalysis if we're being more descriptivist.

It's an interesting subject, and I'm kind of split on it as an amateur linguist, but as an English speaker it sticks out like a sore thumb to me. I think English prescriptivism has pushed the order of pronouns in collective noun/pronoun phrases too much (eg. he and I, not I and him), and people have started to reanalyze the phrase as a noun phrase in itself, but not everyone so it sounds weird to a slice of the population. Then there's disjunctive pronouns that throws a wrench in the works.

Note: asterisk means it sounds ungrammatical to speakers of the language in linguistics (me in this case), no asterisk means okay to say. Also later correct reformulation means it's less common but still correct:

Alice, Bob and I are going.

*I are going.

I am going.

Me, Alice, and Bob are going.

*Me are going.

*Me am going.

Want to join me?

*Want to join I?

*Want to join Alice, Bob and I? <-- this is the one that annoys me, but you might think it's fine

Want to join Alice, Bob and me?

Alice and Bob aren't going probably, but me, I'm going for sure

Alice and Bob aren't going probably, but I, I'm going for sure

It's me who is going

It's me who am going <-- this is pushing it

It's I who is going

It's I who am going <-- actually acceptable, but I still do a double take

Alice and Bob like to go more than me

Alice and Bob like to go more than I

I hate linguistic prescriptionism and believe all English is fine if people understand what you mean, so things like this just gives me ammo to bother others in the future.

I could care less about conscious vs conscious before, but now that I know it slightly annoys others I'll never spell it with the e ever again

Grammer is really quirky and I could literally talk about it for hours. The affect that grammer has on all of us is really something to behold, it really peaks my interest. Some people "go nucular" when talking about grammer but you and I are on the same page I think.

People using "reactionary" instead of "reactive"

run the gambit

when they mean

run the gamut

Maybe it's because I've been familiar with color gamut since like Photoshop 5 or something. And I know people that really likely know the gamut word but they just got the telephone version of the phrase at some point I guess.

The reframing of "politics" to whatever people think it means. My cliffnotes of "politics" is "engaging with social relations through the lens of power", not "stuff people in parliament do" or "minority emancipation " or whatever other extremely reductive definition people use.

I keep class signifiers out of conversation, but things like "eckspecially" or "nucular" annoy me. But that's my dad's elitist elocution coming through.

X-of instead of X-have.

"Well actually ", "Consider" and other codewords that suggest I am about to receive a take of breathtaking innanity and self-importance

This might be the perfect place for me to take the soapbox and tell you all about my opinion on singular "they" (no, it isn't that one)

Singular "they" should be treated as any other singular pronoun for the sake of clarity.

They ~~are~~ eating pancakes.
They is eating pancakes.

Using "whilst" where "while" would work fine. Feels like the grammatical equivalent of plastic cutlery spray-painted chrome

"she has no conscious" makes me lose my mind. Same with "would of". The education system is beyond terrible. So many adults are borderline illiterate

Doubling down on the "I could care less" as a misinterpretation of "I couldn't care less".

The phrase "I could not care less" means someone doesn't care whatsoever. Saying "I could care less" implies the person does care. I had no idea how widespread it was until I started using US websites.

Also, it doesn't so much annoy me, but

"same difference"

it's like they took the phrases "same thing" and "no difference" and combined them into one phrase that makes no sense

"Cue" means "to indicate to another party that it is now time to undertake a previously planned action"

"Queue" means "to line up neatly"

They are not interchangeable and the only explanation I can think of is people seeing "queue" on their phone's music player and thinking that means "start music"

Oh and while I'm whining "discreet" means "secret" and "discrete" means "its own separate thing" GET IT RIGHT