I would like to throw the following words and phrases into Room 101 because they make me twitch and mutter evil things. You are welcome to join me with your own contributions. 1. Utilise. Say use, damn it! 2. Reach out. As in "let's reach out to our customers." No. Reach into a mousetrap. 3. Touch base. As in "let's touch base on this later." No, let's not. This is supposed to be light-hearted, not a serious discussion about the evolution of language etc. Although, when I take over the world, these will be banned.
Awesome. Unless it's the grand canyon, a black hole or the end of the world as we know it. It should never be a piece of pie.
Some misuses of terms and idioms that really get to me: Using "literally" to mean "not literally". It literally makes my ears bleed. (Not literally!) Using "hacking" to mean exploiting a human vulnerability rather than a software vulnerability. It is an insult to actual hackers. (Example: if you leave your computer without logging out and someone gets access to your Facebook account, then that is not "hacking". If someone writes code to download your data from Facebook's server without proper authorization, then that is hacking.) Using "I could care less" to mean "I couldn't care less". ("I could care less" = "I care more than not at all.")
@daemon 's covered my #1 hate (literally). (Maybe I'm just xenophobic, but) that 'off of' Americanism makes me grit my teeth. I've never heard, 'I put my keys on of the table'... it makes no sense I tells ya. Claiming something is ironic when it's just funny, coincidental or unfortunate. 'Ticking all the boxes'. Do people really enjoy bureaucracy so much that they want to evoke it in situations that are otherwise blissfully free of it?
"Begs the question." It's fine when correctly used, but I'm not sure that I've ever seen it correctly used, outside discussions of the phrase itself.
I'm with you on this one. Though, had I been there on "coining day" I would probably have interjected something to the tune of, "And what's the likelihood of anyone using that correctly?" ETA: You have to be from the American South-East to hear this one, but in that region the word "anymore" gets used to mean "nowadays" or "these day". That one needs a kick right in the teeth.
I hear it used properly infrequently enough that when it is used correctly it makes me stop a moment and say "Aha!" 99.9% of the time it is used wrong, particularly in the news media.
In general, and not to get too serious, I personally object to Brits objecting to Americanisms on principle as much as Americans objecting to Briticisms on principle. That's just ethnocentric. Australians, I've noticed, generally lean back and don't participate in that dynamic, thinking us all fuq-wits for doing so.
As for Brits, I'll present this excerpt from Henry VI, Part 2: "SUFFOLK: How camest thou so? SIMPCOX: A fall off of a tree. Wife: A plum-tree, master." So sayeth the Bard.
Though - and just to play devil's grammatical advocate - the Bard himself was known to make use of from whence as a construction when meter demanded the extra beat. This, to my mind, is unconscionable. Adding a preposition before whence is a capital crime in my book! Capital, I tell you!
Yes, that is a twist of the language for the sake of the art I got the Shakespeare quote from a reference to OED, which apparently shows the use of "off of" going back some 500 years, and provided multiple examples of such use. So even if the use is more common in American English now, it didn't originate here (ie. it is not an Americanism). And I read an interesting article some years ago that showed certain English uses in America that were originally British, but are no longer used in the UK, as well as other uses that evolved separately in the U.S. after the oppressors were thrown out. Quite fascinating.
The fact that I heard the term "Literal" has gained a definition of "when used in the exaggerative figurative expression" This makes me cry on the inside.
Agreed. From a linguistic POV, it's only intuitive that both BrE and AmE have diverged from there common point of origin. To say that modern AmE has somehow fallen from the mark represented by modern BrE is false. They have both changed over the span of time.