It bugs me when people say “the thing is is that” (if you listen for it, you’ll start hearing it… or maybe that’s something that people only do in my area.) (“What the thing is is that…” is fine. But “the thing is is that…” bugs me.)
Also, “just because <blank> doesn’t mean <blank>.” That sentence structure invites one to take “just because <blank>” as a noun phrase which my brain really doesn’t want to do. Just doesn’t seem right. But that sentence structure is very common.
And I’m not saying there’s anything objectively wrong with either of these. Language is weird and complex and beautiful. It’s just fascinating that some commonly-used linguistic constructions just hit some people wrong sometimes.
Edit: I thought of another one. “As best as I can.” “The best I can” is fine, “as well as I can” is good, and “as best I can” is even fine. But “as best as” hurts.
It speaks to an ever-evolving world, culture and society. But nothing and nobody really speaks to me.
#Reason being is
wtf is that
That actually ended up evolving over the last 75 or so years. Reason being is that I’m just playing, just wanted to use it.
I hate the confusion that “do you mind” questions cause.
“Do you mind if I turn off the light?”
What is meant in response: “No (I don’t mind)”
What’s said instead: “Yes”
I feel like two people never really know how the other will interpret it, so you almost always have to say something like “yes, go ahead” or “no, I don’t mind” (or “no, go ahead”). If they do respond just “yes” or “no”, I feel like I have to ask for clarification.
Also can we get the meaning of “semi-” and “bi-” figured out? I generally love the oddities of evolving language so long as we can all still be understood, but these two always require clarification.
Bi-annual: Every two years.
Semi-annual: Twice a yearMake it a law!
This is why we need to bring back yae and nay. We used to have two different yes and no words, one set was used in exactly this context. French still has it IIRC. I can’t remember which were which in English, I think yae and nay were for positive questions, and yes and no were for negative questions. Aha, quick Google shows that is right, neat.
What are your thoughts on the word “biennial”?
I allow it only as it pertains to plants, anyone using it for an event deserves prison.
Just say “go ahead” or “please don’t.”
OP, thanks for asking. I feel seen.
- Using the past tense instead of the subjunctive mood. “What if she was gone?” Nope. It should be “what if she were gone.” People (in the US) seem to get this wrong most of the time, except for a few common phrases like “If I were you, …”.
- The words “whilst,” “amongst,” and “amidst.” I get that there is a certain history to these words, but I personally never use them as they seem like meaningless alterations. When I hear them, I roll my eyes, but I try not to judge too quickly.
- “Irregardless”. It’s not a word.
- “Could care less”. An oldie but a goodie?
- Overuse of commas. I don’t like seeing them as strictly a way to introduce a pause in speech. Commas have specific grammatical purposes, and using them without such a purpose breaks my expectations as a reader.
- Confusing “nauseous” and “nauseated”.
Thank you
The first one is something of a lost cause, so long as English grammar continues to be neglected in schooling. I very much doubt that more than a couple of students in my high school had ever heard the term subjunctive mood outside of French or Spanish lessons, where it was always presented as this very alien concept.
“What if she was gone?”
Not a native speaker. That’s what I was taught. Subjunctive wasn’t a thing in my English lessons. Common phrases like “I wish I were you…” were introduced as a non-standard alternative…
Interesting! It’s possible your teacher was trying to keep things simple, especially since most English speakers probably couldn’t tell you what the subjunctive mood is.
I don’t think I learned about the subjunctive mood in Spanish class for 5 years, by which time I was in the 8th grade.
5 is one that I see a lot lately. People just seem to think, that if they can possibly pause, there’s a comma.
I hate the recent trend of using “onboarding”. It sounds clunky to me and as if you’re trying to sound all cool and up to date.
Is there a replacement that you’re fond of? We use it all the time at work - onboarding free users, onboarding paid users, onboarding employees.
I hate when people use the transitive “going to be” to describe “is.”
“Hey, what’s your phone number?” “It’s going to be 911-551-0911.”
Her phone number is 911-551-0911 and has been such for a while now. Why does she feel the need to use a transitive verb structure to describe that it will change to that in the future?
I see people using this “it’s going to be” structure for ordering food (they are ordering food now, saying “spaghetti, please” is much less weird than saying “it’s going to be spaghetti”), as part of my job when someone is reporting current or past statistics, and events that aren’t coming up or aren’t scheduled, and are in the past.
Don’t dial that phone number to see if it works; you’ll get the fuzz.
Sometimes it really annoys me if a perfect spot for a proper “whom” is missed. Even worse though is a misplaced “whom”. Both instances are easy for me to spot because we decline pronouns quite a lot in German.
Edit: Sorry that’s not a construction, so much as just an error. For constructions one thing that gets on my nerves is if you try to tell someone about your previous state of mind to clear up a misunderstanding like “I thought the water had boiled already” and then they say “no” to tell you that your assumption was incorrect. This is annoying because first of all the information they are conveing is already known to you by the time of this discussion and secondly in the grammatical sense they are actually disagreeing with your state of mind, not the content. I always have the urge to say: “Yes, actually, I’m telling you that’s what I thought, you can’t disagree with me about what I was thinking.”
Its not even an error. The majority of english speakers wont use “whom” in that spot, so its not an error anymore.
Whatever
I hate that punctuation is “supposed” to go inside quotation marks. If you doing anything more complex than a simple statement of a quote, you run into cases where it doesn’t make sense to me.
Did he say “I had pancakes for supper?”andDid he say “I had pancakes for supper”?mean different things to me.Similarly:
That jerk called me a “tomato!”andThat jerk called me a “tomato”!It feels to me that the first examples add emphasis to the quotes that did not exist when originally spoken, whereas the second examples isolate the quote, which is the whole point of putting it in quotation marks.
Hard agree on this
I go out of my way to rephrase sentences due to this. That jerk called me a “tomato” for some reason!
Yeah but I shouldn’t have to restructure a sentence because some dipshit centuries ago made an objectively stupid grammatical rule that generally increases ambiguity.
Sure, but we don’t control what happened centuries ago.
Yeah but we can react to said change to either entrench or undermine it. I choose the latter.
Oh yeah 100%. This is a grammatical rule that I specifically refuse to follow. Writing it the “correct” way can and does meaningfully obscure the semantics of the quoted utterance in some circumstances.
Yes! That’s a good one.
Once place I’ve heard this take on punctuation mentioned is in Eric Raymond’s (version of) the Hacker Jargon File.
(I just realized when I included a link in the above sentence, I included the word “in” to make it clear I was not referring to the whole Hacker Jargon File, but rather a specific part in it.)
Completely agree, I put puncutation outside the quotes, screw the rules, being sensical is more important.
I agree with this so much. Your understanding just makes sense to me. And it’s even worse because we don’t do that in German, so I’m used to the sensible way! That just makes it feel extra weird.
Turning words like"competence" and “resilience” into “competency” and “resiliency” because more syllables is moar smartr
I feel like the same people who say “best practice” at every opportunity also say “core competency” and “resiliency”.
Electric, electrical.
Symmetric, symmetrical.
Historic, historical
“Going forward” bothers me so much and I have no idea why. It wasn’t used when I was younger, but that’s true for lots of things.
Also “cringe” is pretty annoying.
Going forward is the worst of corporate-speak. I refuse to use this phrase.
”Going forward”
Because it’s a management phrase meant for discussions in directing a group that’s been co-opted by peers to make them sound more authoritative than their relative position actually is.
Had a co-worker say this to me the other day about something and I realized that I don’t like being spoken to as a subordinate by my peers.
The over usage of “that” on news broadcasts.
“It’s that time of ___!” (Insert day, week, year, fall, spring, summer, etc)
There are many countless examples. It’s like nails on a chalkboard every time I hear it
“Aren’t I”, as in “I’m still going with you, aren’t I?”, which, when uncontracted, becomes “are I not?” It should be “ain’t I” since “ain’t” is a proper contraction for “amn’t”, but there’s been an irrational suppression of “ain’t”.
I’d say the suppression of ain’t is perfectly rational unless you want to sound like a cowboy
which, when uncontracted, becomes “are I not?”
Nope ‘are not I?’
People who say “nucular” strike me as being completely brain damaged.
I’m sure you say that in jest to some extent, I do know some people who say “arks” instead of “ask” and they have never realised it until it was pointed out. I’d say a similar phenomenon happens with “nucular”
I’m not certain if this is what you were getting at, but these are mine:
An historical - It doesn’t follow the general way of using a or an with consonants and vowels. Nor does it change the meaning if I said a historical (event) instead an historical (event).
Fewer and less. I understand that there is a rule, but the rule is fucking dumb. If I say there are less people or if I say there are fewer people - the end result is the same that there isn’t as much as there was before.
Language is fluid. As long as we understand the meaning of what is being said then who cares?
Ya “an historic”, when the h is clearly pronounced, strikes the wonderful double blow of being both pretentious and wrong as far as I’m concerned. Looking at you, NPR. Go run up an hill, why donchya?
You may be fewer irritated by this with age
I understood what you were saying! I am fewer irritated. I would personally use less, because it sounds better in this instance, but totally agree. Not sure how I’d put a number to my irritation though. I am not a robot, so my irritation isn’t exactly a quantifiable scale.
“an historic” works if you’re not pronouncing the “h”, which is common in some dialects. A vs an isn’t about there being an actual vowel, it’s about the sound. The same happens with honor and herb (again, depending on pronunciation).
Yes and in American English the H sound in historic is always used with “a” unless I’m missing a bunch of examples somewhere. The H sound isn’t silent
dialects
French?
No, mostly British and some parts of New England.
mostly British
No, mostly not British. Only proper cockney geezer really.
Lay lie, ffs why differentiate Who whom, it serves no great purpose Words like recie||eive, do I need to explain? Must not should be must’n
