Idiots misspelling lose as loose drives me up the wall. Even had someone defend themselves claiming it’s just the common spelling now and to accept it. There, their, and they’re get honorable mention. Nip it in the butt as opposed to correctly nipping it in the bud.

Irregardless

Discreet vs Discrete used to crack me up on dating sites. All those guys looking for discrete hookups - which kind of makes sense but I am sure is not what they meant.

I literally ground my teeth today because I got an email from a customer service person saying “You’re package was returned to us”. Not a phishing email with an intentional misspelling, a legitimate email for a real order I made. If it is your JOB to send messages like this they ought not have misspellings.

So the context matters to me. I am more tolerant of spelling errors and mis-phrasing in everyday life than in a professional communication.

breaked vs broke

Respect the irregular verbs

Irregardless

“Most best”

• literally. There’s the door.
• ‘emails’. Like ‘traffics’. Learn why.
• ‘startup’ vs ‘start up’ (see shutdown and so many others)
• irregardless. Just follow the ‘litchally’ clod out.
• ‘the ask’ for ‘the request’ or ‘the question’. Because life imitates a used car dealership. See ‘the spend’, ‘action this’, and whatever cocaine and flop-sweat gives us tomorrow. Go sell a car.
• ‘unless…’ NO. Finish the Sentence.
• when ‘could’ve’ became ‘could of’ and no one laughed their ass off at the guy, this was our missed opportunity.

Bonus: my friends are parents of elementary-school children. ‘Skibidi’ is one of so many words they researched carefully to make sure and screw up its usage as often as they can. It’s a game, and I think they secretly keep score of eye-rolls earned. They’re doing hero’s work.

Idk if this counts as a phrase, but on the internet, people talk about their pets crossing the rainbow bridge when they die. That’s not how the rainbow bridge poem goes. Pets go to a magnificent field when they die. They are healed of all injury and illness. When you die, they find you in the field and you cross the bridge together. It’s much sweeter the way it was written than the way people use it.

It’s always going to be the “of” people. Its “would have”, “should have” etc and not “would of”.

The vast majority of these issues could be solved if people a) read any halfway-decent book, b) and didn’t choose to remain willfully ignorant. It’s fine to misunderstand or just not know something. We’ve all been there, we’ll be there again. NBD. But to be shown or offered the correct way and still choose to do it wrongly? That’s not cool at all.

What entitlement means vs false sense of entitlement.

I tell people they are entitled to their rights and have an entitlement to their social security money for example, and they get offended thinking I mean “false sense of entitlement” instead.

People saying “exscape”, “expresso”, “pasghetti”

Online in general: using “reductio ad absurdum” as a fallacy.

It’s a longstanding logical tool. Here’s an example of how it works: let’s assume you can use infinity as a number. In that case, we can do:

∞ + 1 = ∞

And:

∞ - ∞ = 0

Agreed? If so, then:

∞ - ∞ + 1 = ∞ - ∞

And therefore:

1 = 0

Which is absurd. If we agree that all the logical steps to get there are correct, then the original premise (that we can use infinity as a number) must be wrong.

It’s a great tool for teasing out incorrect assumptions. It has never been on any academic list of fallacies, and the Internet needs to stop saying otherwise. It’s possible some other fallacy is being invoked while going through an argument, but it’s not reductio ad absurdum.

About 1 in 3 posters here say “loose” when they mean “lose”

“addicting”

Yeah /yĕ′ə, yă′ə, yā′ə/ is a different word than Yea /yā/