Things That Annoy Me, But Shouldn't

How did you guess?

Shit, I'd forgotten about that....

 

*spits coffee*“Hostage Tapes”!!! I’m still tee-hee ing as I type this.

Sounds like the former colleague is the one who brings down the other four in the “you’re the average of the five people who...” thing. And he sounds a lot like one of my relatives, so you have my sympathies, Ash.

Thing That Annoys Me But Shouldn’t: Substitutes that have more calories and sugar than the thing you’re trying to avoid. (Or maybe that should be an annoyance.)

 

Aloe Vera?

 

Well, hello to you too!

 

Uh Oh... Sorry to hear your friend has joined a cult. . MLMs are the devil.

 

It does kinda feel that way, when you watch those tapes on sales testimonials like that.

So Pre-Testimonial shoot like audio, so the vic- I mean customer says good things about the product.

 

Strange dreams.

 

You settle the darlings into bed for the night after running up and down the stairs like an idiot for foot spray (yes foot spray more fool me) and the right kind of thickness pyjama top ....just sitting down with that big glass of wine and your writing........ Suddenly The Most god awful, blood curdling scream and
"Mummy!!!!""
You run up the stairs thinking that it had better be the apocalypse and burst into the bedroom of your 5 and 3 yr old daughters, Shouting
"Now what is it !"

"Mummy I forgot to say I love you"
arrggghhhh....but oh bless them all at the same time... You win kids... you win

 

I lost the battle (at least here in the forums) to stop the use of the noun, 'cliché' as an adjective, but I heard a national television news anchor begin a sentence this morning with, 'Me and my colleagues ...'. Can we agree that construction is simply wrong?

 

Cliche is loanword that we nounified from the French verb clicher. Seems only fair that we let it make all the rounds.

 

No, and I don't pronounce 'Paris' as 'Paree', either. Our ground, our rules, origin be damned.

 

So, now you're okay with it being an adjective?

 

Um, no. 'Cliché' is a noun. It doesn't seem all that difficult to add a 'd' to the end to make it an adjective and spare the feelings of pedants like me, and display one's knowledge of proper grammar at the same time. Errors like this are like fingernails down a chalkboard to many of us (and should be to all writers, I think).

 

I wouldn't say it's an error per-se, more of an example of the malleability of English. Which is rather a defining characteristic of the language. I personally dislike it when people use gifted in the sense of giving a gift, like," the watch was gifted to me by my father." Not because I thing it's wrong, but because I feel it looks and sounds both ugly and a little pretentious.

 

I agree about 'gifted' and a lot of other nouns which have become verbs. Another thing that drives me nuts: I just started reading a suspense novel by a very well-known author and ran smack dab into this: "Neither Decker or his wife wanted strangers paddling around the house in a bathrobe and slippers. Paddling was strictly his domain." Probably an artifact of the publisher's spell checker, but someone should have caught it. I did.

 

Lexicography must drive you nuts. You know, the more a word is misused or misspelled, the closer it comes to supplanting its predecessor as the "proper" form. That's how words end up with the modifier "archaic" in their definitions. One of my personal irritants is the nonword "empathetic". According to an article I read though, it's now used 40% of the time in place of "empathic". I don't know how they would clock that with any accuracy at all, but it sounds about right.

Fun fact: if trends continue, "alot" will soon exist in the dictionary as an official compound word no matter how hard grammarians fight it.


These things are bothersome, to be sure, but I don't get nails-on-chalkboard-y until I see then/than malapropism when it obviously isn't a typo. I didn't even know that was a thing until the advent of comment sections and social media. There/their/they're? Sure, that's always been a problem. Your/you're? Same. Two/too/to? Of course, but then/than confusion is utter nonsense. They aren't even pronounced the same unless you schwa all your vowels like a yokel. (I just appropriated a noun as a verb, by the way, but that was more a poetic license attempt at creating a nonce neologism that it was malapropism.) An/and drives me buggy too.

My number-one-with-a-bullet pet peeve though has to be snooty grammarians incorrectly correcting people, as in: "You're supposed to say 'feel badly', instead of 'feel bad'." WRONG. If you feel badly, it means your emotional mechanisms are malfunctioning. Or even better, "'data' is plural. Say 'data are' instead of 'data is'." WRONG. Well, they're half right on this one. "Data" is the plural form of "datum", but "data" is also singular when referring to a collective. This also applies to "the media is". I don't care what you read on a grammar fascist's blog. These things are true. (I also don't like the term "grammar nazi". It diminished the horrific connotations the word "nazi" should permanently retain.)

Whew! Sorry. Grammar rants sometimes get away from me.

 

I've never seen 'empathetic', but I may have just read it as 'empathic'. Your 'schwa' is a good example of a deliberate misuse that serves a purpose. The turning of 'cliche' into an adjective does not. Neither does the construction which started this conversation. 'Me and my colleagues' is just stupid. My theory is that we have become so self-obsessed that we can't even bring ourselves to put someone else first in a sentence. Another plain stupidity is the fact that, among young people anyway, 'literally' has come to mean its exact opposite. How does that happen? (Also, notice the lack of an apostrophe in 'its'. Not three people in ten can get that right.)

I have no doubt that this is a losing battle, but we writers should be on the front lines, fighting the good fight. After all, we're talking about the tools of our trade.

 

Yeeeeah...but for 'creative writing' it is going to be 'me and a bunch of friends'? Don't you think @Longfellow?

And 'literally?' That's like literally 1995...

 

I guess that depends on what side of this good fight you think you should be on. Should we be on the side that constantly seeks to upset the status quo and challenge the morphemocracy, or should we be on the side that thinks we should plant our sticks firmly in the mud of fuddy-duddery. When it comes to the tools of our craft, we shouldn't be ashamed to create tools that are more suitable to the tasks presented to us. Tools change. This is why we have iron, computers and GPS systems.

 

Well flibbertygibbits, there goes the language.

 

I know. It literally kills me.

Actually, if they were doing it on purpose, I would probably love it. It's the absolute epitome of hyperbole. There's no stronger exaggeration than one that loops all the way around to contradict itself. It's almost poetic. As is, I think it's here to stay. It will probably one day date its users like the word "awesome" does my generation. There's something fun in that too, the idea that kids will someday respond to "I literally can't even" with "Oh my God, how old are you!?" That makes me smile.

I'm with you, but my bigger qualm is with people's complete ignorance of the word "whose". "Who's" is not possessive. Three in ten would be a shock on that one. Of course, we're talking about the unwashed internet masses here. They do still teach this in school, but there's no pressure or reinforcement of these principles in web-mob rule.

Software companies could fix this if they wanted to, or help at least. Spelling would be much worse around here without spellcheck. I want these grammar checkers incorporated into browsers and SMS immediately.

 

Sure they do. It's likely that Shakespeare and I (sorry, me and Shakespeare) would have trouble understanding each other, even though we were both speaking English. The only 'task presented to us' as writers, it seems to me, is to communicate ideas to others. How much more difficult would that be if the meanings of words varied from writer to writer? Fuddy-duddy? Maybe, but more readers will be able to understand what I'm talking about.