I’m stuck at the Atlanta airport right now so I’m watching CNN with the sound off. They just put the following caption onscreen while discussing that poor child who was murdered by the Sunday school teacher:
DID MURDERED CHILD TRUST TOO MUCH?
Try to convince me that our civilization is not collapsing.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
No empire ever dies, it merely changes forms. Just as Rome’s "death" actually resulted in the flowering of the Frankish and Visigothic realms.
Our civilization isn’t "collapsing," it’s merely giving birth to some other form of civilization. One where democracy is more hands-on, more direct. You know, like in Iraq.
Incertus
Sorry, my life is already filled with the impossible task of getting college freshpeople to recognize the difference between "lose" and "loose."
John Cole
lol. I saw that right as I was switching to BSG. I will make it through this damned entire show if it kills me.
DougJ
Ha.
The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
Considering DougJ’s outrage at this perfectly reasonable statement, I guess he also believes it’s always the guy’s fault for assaulting the girl, no matter how scantily clad the girl was.
@Incertus: Ahh, I take it you’ve managed to get them past the lesson on "you’re" and "your"?
r€nato
@Incertus:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUGGGGGGGGHHHH!
I fucking HATE it when people do that. When did that shit start, anyway? Growing up, I don’t remember that people/us kids had trouble differentiating between the two.
It used to apall me that people would mix up ‘to’ and ‘too’. I can’t get excited about that any longer, it’s so common. But that ‘loose/lose’ shit drives me nuts.
Sigh. I blame liberal secular educational elites.
Zam
God was clearly punishing this child for not doing enough to stand up against homosexuality. At least that’s what I hear.
Martin
Seems like a reasonable enough headline, actually. I never thought children should be asked to trust religion either. Nice to see the world coming around.
Zam
@The Cat Who Would Be Tunch: He’s probably lucky if he’s got them past "yer"
Incertus
@John Cole: Just a warning–it probably will.
r€nato
@The Cat Who Would Be Tunch:
don’t even get me started about ‘they’re’ and ‘their’.
not to mention that it’s ‘toe the line’ not ‘tow the line’.
It’s ‘tough row to hoe’, not – as an alleged college graduate who actually had to write a lot for a living insisted to me – ‘tough road to hoe’.
(I politely suggested that hoeing a road makes no sense whatsoever, but this woman was too dense to catch the clue I was throwing her way)
Incertus
@The Cat Who Would Be Tunch: Oh hell no.
And frankly, given how rare it is to see an apostrophe used correctly in public–on street signs, in advertisements, etc.–I’m about ready to start advocating for the elimination of the apostrophe completely.
Martin
I think you might be wrong on this one. They mean the same thing, but the latter is what you use in term papers and the former when texting and tweeting as it gives you an extra character at the end for another exclamation point.
Incertus, stuck yet again in his ivory tower, unable to see the world on which the rest of us reside.
Steve
I don’t want to be all like, "hey, the ALLEGED killer," but is it really that clear to everyone that the Sunday School teacher did it? For all I know from the reporting she could be as guilty as Richard Jewell or Jon-Benet’s parents.
Martin
Oh, and Lou Dobbs will explode soon:
Dennis-SGMM
@r€nato:
And "With baited breath" rather than "with bated breath."
Ked
Oh, no, it’s not civilization collapsing, it’s just the cable news networks. When the only reasonable (and I’m not claiming quality, just reasonable) hour on six (or is it seven?) networks’ worth of airtime is a partisan radio host made good, you know just how bankrupt they are.
(Repeat after me: BAIL OUT WOLF BLITZER!)
BSG won’t kill you – you’ll just feel like killing yourself for most of season 4.5. I’m not going to call the ending downbeat, but it’s a lot more subtle and loopy than anyone was expecting.
KRK
@Incertus:
First they came for the semicolon….
steve s
Worse than that, the use of ` as an apostrophe when typing. Or the retarded use of quote marks for emphasis. I laugh every time I’m driving in Lake City, Florida, past that one trailer manufacturer whose signs say:
"Save" thousands!
…your quote marks are not doing what you think they’re doing….
opium4themasses
So I went to read an article about this and found a little gem.
78,000 is now a small town? I wonder what they think about Northwest Iowa where I lived while in Jr High.
steve s
ugh. Why is the blockquote tag malfunctioning when there’s an empty line? My post, edited to avoid that bug:
Worse than that, the use of ` as an apostrophe when typing. Or the retarded use of quote marks for emphasis. I laugh every time I’m driving in Lake City, Florida, past that one trailer manufacturer whose signs say:
"Save" thousands!
…your quote marks are not doing what you think they’re doing….
r€nato
@Dennis-SGMM:
"for all intents and purposes", not "for all intensive purposes"
"just deserts", not "just desserts"
"a moot point", not "a mute point"
"tried and true", not "trite and true"
opium4themasses
should of, could of, would of
argh.
Incertus
@opium4themasses: Yeah, that one pisses me off too.
Sometimes they’re funny, like the student who wrote that people "shouldn’t take their lives for granite" or the one who said a poet was "taking the Lord’s name in vein." But mostly they’re depressing.
Ked
As this has taken on some open-thread flavor, also, was anyone else getting SarahPAC ads on the Google Ad sidebar here yesterday?
How long does it take for a blog’s alignment shift to percolate through the advertising lists anyway?
cyntax
@r€nato:
Good luck on the mute point thing.
I’ve also given up on trying to correct business speak.
Someone in thread already mentioned Visigoths anyway…
Andre
I’m really sorry.
opium4themasses
@Incertus: The "vein" one seems apropos given my name and the main product of the plant.
"Oh God, this heroin is great!"
Left Coast Tom
@opium4themasses: In addition to 78,000 not being "small" (Tracy is an exurb of San Francisco, with the foreclosure rate to prove it), Tracy isn’t "north" of San Francisco, it’s east.
Evolved Deep Southerner
@Incertus: My own personal favorite from a freshperson: "my self of steam"
Krista
I just wish that people could figure out that "alot" is not a word.
One thing is for certain: I know I will make mistakes as a parent, but my children will NOT leave my home without knowing the difference between "it’s" and "its".
It’s a shame, really, because a lot of this mangling is done by otherwise intelligent individuals. I don’t think they realize how genuinely unintelligent these errors make them look.
steve s: I know what you mean about the unintentional quote marks. Our local burger joint advertises a lobster burger. It has real lobster in it, and is quite good. However, how inclined could anybody be to order the "lobster" burger?
Andre
@Krista:
You might like this:
http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
AhabTRuler
Try to convince me that we were ever "civilized".
[/bitter like my coffee]
Wile E. Quixote
@KRK
I had my semi-colon removed. Now I have to punctuate into a plastic bag. Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week.
Col. Klink
If you turn off the idiot box civilization looks a whole lot better. You’ll be happier too. Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!
Montysano
The owner of the company where I’ve worked for 18 years, a college graduate no less, is one of the worst writers on the planet. Horrid grammar, mangled syntax, misspellings, malapropisms, USES ALL CAPS. He refuses all attempts at proofreading. We see his work when we’re copied on outgoing emails. It’s just awful, and over the years I think it’s hurt us as a company.
The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
@Incertus:
I’m surprised you haven’t complained about getting essays written in SMS format yet.
P.S. For the acronym challenged, SMS stands for Short Messaging Service, more commonly known as "text messaging". kthxbye.
apistat
I heard my all time favorite news teaser the other night. "Who would shoot a puppy? Find out tonight at 11"
That’s a direct quote.
Wile E. Quixote
There’s also "expecting the calvary."
KCinDC
Krista, are you sure it wasn’t "loobster"?
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Incertus:
I came out of the grocery store one time to find a professionally printed flier on the windshield with the headline "Loose Weight!" and immediately feared that Kirstie Allie had dropped 100 lbs and it was wandering the countryside, menacing all who came near.
Then I read the rest of the flier and was sorely disappointed.
Andre
@Montysano:
I work for a telecom company, which you would think would hire people with at least a modicum of technical savvy. We have one individual who is in her fifties and has a longstanding aversion to punctuation, e.g.:
Believe me, knowing what the abbreviations mean doesn’t help with understanding what she’s talking about.
Halteclere
Don’t forget "peaked my interest".
Phonetically, what’s the problem!
Llelldorin
I think the "small town" thing may just be the usual California population deflation. Tracy’s something like the 95th largest city in California. It’d be something like 32nd in Texas,11th in Virginia, 7th in New York state, or the biggest city in West Virginia.
California has so very many very large cities that we have a bad habit of waxing rhapsodic about the "small town feel" of any city under 100,000 residents (that is, starting around our 68th largest city).
Celshader
For what it’s worth, here’s a link to my minicomic series about typos:
http://celshader.com/lore/p_editor/
:^)
Left Coast Tom
I live in California’s SF Bay Area…to me Weaverville is a "small town". Tracy is an exurb…aside from it’s noticeable population, as an exurb it isn’t really a standalone city. It used to be, but the Army Depot is closed and the ketchup/catsup plant is closed.
Tattoosydney
@Incertus:
… and that citing "Wikipedia" or "the internet" is not an acceptable referencing technique.
Accidental Blogger
I really think its more television news collapsing than it is the larger civilization. And there’s no escaping it; I’m stuck watching cable news all day at work and there’s no redemption there. I gave up last week when CNN had a ten minute segment discussing how Nebraska was the happiest state in the Union per some random economic calculation. That merited more time than any actual news on GM or the budget or unemployment or Iraq or anything of actual use. Good grief. Somehow I’m certain I used the wrong ‘than’ somewhere up there and that it is going to end up being called out.
GSD
My pet peeve is the use of prolly instead of probably.
-GSD
Llelldorin
@Left Coast Tom:
Oh, hi! Hayward resident, here.
Fair enough. My perceptions are probably skewed by growing up in South Pasadena (pop. 24,292) and living for a time in Pacifica (pop. 40,401), both of which are described incessantly by residents and local papers as "small towns." I don’t know Tracy as well as you obviously do; I’ve never done more than driven through there. (I didn’t want a house badly enough to move beyond the reach of BART, so I settled on a Hayward condo.)
patrick
And since when is prolly a word? The word is probably! I can almost understand people being lazy enough not to say all the letters, but when it’s written that way? Jaysus!
Oh… and it’s "8 items or fewer" not "8 items or less"
Damn it! Now you got me started!
nnyhav
rein/reign
Left Coast Tom
@Llelldorin: Actually, my issue with "small town" as applied to Tracy is, in part, that no place with that much traffic could possibly be "small". Most of us, I’m sure, have sat in that traffic on the way to the Sierra. I suspect that in the past the label may have fit, before the farmland was filled with McMansions, but those days are past.
opium4themasses
@Llelldorin: Eh, I don’t want to buy it, but I know plenty of people with no sense of proportion.
Just think of the ridiculousness of the following conversation I bet a lot of people formerly of Tracy are having now.
Random city-dweller
Ex-Tracyite
Random city-dweller
Ex-Tracyite grumbles.
Zam
@GSD: How bout probly?
gbear
I worked with an architect who constantly listened to Rush and was an enthusiastic dittohead. I was picking up redlines on one of his drawings when I came upon the term ‘facture finish’. I’d never heard of this kind of a finish before so I thought about it for a minute and went back to ask him if he wanted the item in question to be finished at the factory. He said yep. His memos were infamous and he wasn’t allowed to write letters that left the office. Heaven knows what his email messages look like.
PS: Al Franken won again tonight. The three judge panel ruled unanimously that the election was fair.
gbear
Heaven knows why I’m in moderation now.
gbear
edit: (never mind)
Jess
@r€nato:
And "based off" instead of "based on"–when did that get started?
AkaDad
It started with Massachusetts. We got the ball rolling with gay marriage. God doesn’t like to be slapped in the face.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
@r€nato:
Appall.
They say that "appal" is acceptable but I have never used it.
Zuzu's Petals
@Incertus:
I still can’t reconcile myself to the newfangled extra "s" thing. As in "Charles’s chair" rather than "Charles’ chair."
No. Just can’t.
omen
ergh. that story. i come here to escape tv.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
Don’t worry, the blogs will save it.
Jess
@Andre:
Those "signs" remind me of one on the campus of UCSB (they should know better!) that proclaims that "violators maybe cited." I guess I would rather maybe be cited than definitely be so.
Bill Teefy
@opium4themasses:
Hey I live in an unincorporated township of just under 60,000.
It be the 15th largest city in North Carolina and I think we would beat out Cheyenne for number one in Wyoming.
I wish that now the body has been found the NEWS would only consist of need to know facts about the case. I do not give a damn about the day-to-day of this case or any other. News about how to help children, about how to organize safer communities and news about support for helping the neighbors and family cope, yes but no sensationalism. I hate when tragedies like this are use to forward promote news programs. It isn’t news any more. Now its just voyeurism.
Oh and on the apostrophe, etc. I hate when people say Eck-setera. Spell it wrong if you must but aggg! I am off to the Lyeberry.
Zuzu's Petals
@cyntax:
Speaking of business speak…
One of my real peeves is with made-up words and nonsensical terms. Such as:
"Interface" used as a verb.
"Pre-owned" anything.
"Proactive." As if you can be more active than "active."
Yes, I know these words and terms are perfectly acceptable now, and may even appear in the dictionary. So what. They’re still made-up nonsense.
Zed
I was born in Tracy. So was my father, in 1950, and he still lives and works there. Back then it was small, a farming town and railroad switching hub. Even as I was growing up it was smaller, though the exurb development had started by then. To talk about it as a tight knit town nowadays is just a lie. Half the city is made of commuters whose only interest in the area is the school districts they are convinced keep their children out of trouble (but which they are uninterested in paying taxes for). But there are to this day several longtime residents, people whose families have lived in Tracy for years. This whole thing has them all in shock. Just a few months earlier a child was found half naked with a broken leg iron accusing his foster parents of an extended imprisonment. My father was shaking his head as he told me that people are going to start thinking of Tracy as "one of those towns".
Other fun facts about Tracy. Lots of meth production, it’s a major waystation for the Mexican heroin trade, and a documentary was shot in the town about a group of neo-Nazis called "The California Reich."
John D.
@Zuzu’s Petals:
Unless you were born before 1930 or so, proactive as a word predates your birth. It also doesn’t mean "more active than active", but I assume you knew that. What is your specific complaint about pre-owned? It seems to be a perfectly descriptive adjective.
However, interface as a verb, as in all verbing of nouns, is an affront to my mother tongue. Yes, I know I just did it. Go look up "irony".
eemom
OMG, 67 comments and no one has gotten to "its" and "it’s" yet??
That one drives me fucking CRAZY………and it is so obscenely common in bloggerdom. How is it possible that EVERYONE who missed that day in third grade ended up becoming a blogger? How, I ask you……HOW??
JackieBinAZ
these guys didn’t like grammar abuse either.
Incertus
@eemom: Actually, Apple has pissed me off with that one, because the iPhone automatically "corrects" to the apostrophe.
Also, my students can’t seem to understand the difference between "then" and "than." Seriously.
J. Michael Neal
I had them take away my cable last week. I’ve now got a 40" TV solely for DVDs. Listening to a lot of music. Streaming MLB and NHL games.
eemom
"enthused."
"aggravated."
Oh no more. I cannot bear it.
opium4themasses
@Incertus: Canceled the cable here. Been using Hulu and Netflix instant viewing. My LCD TV has a VGA input which makes it a great base station for a laptop.
Just get a wireless keyboard and mouse. I am thinking about buying a bluetooth dongle and getting a wireless keyboard/mouse set so that the signal doesn’t cut out so much from the couch as opposed to the chair.
nikita
@Incertus:
My particular grammatical error pet peeve is the your/you’re confusion and all those bloody extra apostrophes. How did that mess get started anyway? I think it was pluralizing acronyms like "greedy CEO’s" etc and made its way into pluralizing every word that ends with a vowel sound like "family’s". Eeew. Just typing that made me cringe.
A little palate cleansing is in order. I give you Taylor Mali’s "The Impotence of Proofreading."
Edit: Please note, CEOs doesn’t need the apostrophe.
eric
"moneys" or "monies"
worst. word. ever.
cyntax
@Zuzu’s Petals:
Oh yeah, the whole noun to verb thing–those are some good ones.
MobiusKlein
@Steve:
They found the alleged killer’s suitcase. Sure, there may be something out there. She could be covering for the real killer, who knows.
It’s been a big story out here in the west. And it keeps getting creepier.
AnneLaurie
That sounds positively… Steinbeckian. "There was a city here, before the Army moved on and the ketchup plant closed… "
asiangrrlMN
They will pry the comma from my cold, dead fingers.
This is a sign a friend of mine spotted at a Twins/White Sox game (played in Chicago):
Welcome "Back", Joe. It was for a returning player.
She is going to make a sign saying, Welcome to "Minnesota", Joe. I told her we are going to a game and bringing sloppy, misspelled signs with improper grammar to boot, just as a silent protest.
Here is another mistake I detest. When I peruse the personals (yes, I do, so shut up), I often come across people who are looking for someone discrete. Argh!
P.S. I don’t think civilization is collapsing because I have yet to see evidence that we were civilized in the first place.
P.P.S. Where are you officed?
P.P.P.S. I don’t think the media is being very responsible by simply asking if the girl had been too trusting. That puts the onus on the little girl when it should be squarely on the Sunday school teacher. You can’t not trust anyone.
Fern
@eemom:
I used to be able to spell that stuff until I worked as a literacy instructor. I saw its/it’s they’re/their/there and all the rest mis-spelled so often that I have to stop and think about these words when I’m writing.
nnyhav
@cyntax: Responsibled renowned verbifier Alexander Haig.
JK
@dougj
Let’s see, on cable you can watch "news" programs hosted by:
Joe Scarborough, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Greta Van Susteren, Lou Dobbs, and Jim Cramer
On radio, you can listen to Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and Laura Ingraham
Game over, our civilization is definitely collapsing.
b-psycho
@AkaDad:
Unless it’s with balls. Hence the Teabaggers not being visited by a plague of locusts. Yet, at least.
Matthew B.
@patrick:
"8 items or less" is perfectly fine. "Less" has consistently been used with both countable and uncountable nouns throughout the history of English, and is always an acceptable substitute for "fewer." See Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.
MikeJ
Verbing weirds language.
http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/CalvinVerbing.jpg
Matthew B.
@Zuzu’s Petals:
There’s nothing remotely newfangled about the apostrophe-s in "Charles’s chair." Century-old usage guides often recommend it. Of course it’s also acceptable to go without.
Fencedude
Speaking of cable news shows, the Teabagging bit on Countdown tonight was a riot.
I was laughing so hard my eyes started to water. Whoever wrote that deserves a thumbs up, and David Shuster’s delivery was fantastic.
Splitting Image
As long as it has an adequate supply of lemon-soaked paper napkins, I’ll be fine with the change.
Robertdsc-iphone
My iPhone tripped me up today when I was writing a note to a dear friend on Facebook today. She holds a double masters degree so I took extra care to write a coherent message. Where did my iPhone go wrong? It "corrected" my initials. I burned with shame after finding that after it had been sent.
I know another friend who holds a bachelor’s(?)
degree who can’t be bothered to write in English when we send text messages back & forth. It drives me up a wall.
Of course, I almost always write in full English when I text. My long enjoyment of books has taught me to be as careful as possible when I write.
r€nato
@HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker:
ouch. my bad.
Zuzu's Petals
@Matthew B.:
I see what you mean. Looks like Strunk has it both ways, sort of.
But I don’t care. It’s newfangled to me.
r€nato
@Matthew B.:
I looked up the Merriam-Webster Dictionary reference which you cited with regards to ‘less/fewer’.
Merriam-Webster
(search for ‘less,fewer’)
While MW admits that there are occasionally situations when it is ambiguous as far as when it is correct to use ‘fewer’ and when it is correct to use ‘less’ – contrary to the hard-and-fast rule which many English teachers, professors and other assorted language pedants have tried to drum into students’ heads over the decades – MW does not at all state that the two words can be used interchangeably at all times, as you declared.
What’s more, the BBC says you’re wrong as well. And they should know.
It’s a pretty simple rule – use ‘less’ when referring to uncountable objects like a body of water or a mass of air, and use ‘fewer’ when referring to countable, discrete objects like gallons of water or cubic feet of air – and this grammar nazi is gonna stick with it.
r€nato
@JackieBinAZ:
what utter assholes.
jonas
See, this is why I teach my child to punch every stranger he sees directly in the nuts.
BonnyAnne
@ opium4themasses: OK, I’ll bite. Which small town in northwestern Iowa? Which county?
My dad’s entire family is scattered throughout Souix County, with many regrettably in Hull ("home of the original Pizza Ranch!").
~BonnyAnne
CD
As corollary to the "less/fewer" question, my peeve is the use of "under/over" in regard to amounts…such as "over $5,000 worth."
As a wonderful old editor once instilled in me, "Over/under apply only to relative positions in space; amounts are ‘more than’ or ‘less than.’"
Apparently, over 95 percent of all advertisers don’t know this fact. / snark
dslak
One of my favorite malapropisms is ‘veil of tears.’ I once had a fairly educated man, who could not admit to being wrong, attempt to explain the meaning of this metaphor as referring to how difficult it is to see when you’re crying. It was worth a good laugh.
Andre
@jonas:
Get him to limit the punching to fags, commies and darkies and he’ll make an excellent Republican.
The Disgruntled Chemist
@asiangrrlMN:
Well, I certainly don’t want my dating partners spread all over the place.
geemoney
@r€nato:
I have been stuck a little on this, and it made me read every damn comment on this thread. You write:
It’s that second line that gets me. I think you have the words switched (1 ess = Sahara, 2 esses = Baked Alaska, right?). Am I crazy, or is this something I have misunderstood my whole life?
Krista
Exactly. The advertisement for the HPV vaccine drives me up the wall for that exact reason. Their catchphrase is "one less" (by which they mean women who will contract HPV), and it takes a hearty effort to not yell at the tv, "One fewer, you idiots!"
As far as people who add an apostrophe onto the plural form, the less said about that, the better. Every time I drive by a farm stand that says "Carrot’s for sale", I always want to drive up and ask the farmer which of that poor carrot’s belongings they are selling.
Dennis-SGMM
The use of the word "got" in any sentence save "She was got with child." Lamentably, the misuse of "got" has become pervasive.
r€nato
@dslak:
was he an engineer? They’re always right, you know; if one has an advanced degree in engineering, that automatically makes one an expert in everything.
Francis
Tracy may be the most important city in California. The enormous (I mean "enormous" [see comment 32]) pumps that lift water out of the Bay-Delta into the California Aqueduct for distribution to central and southern California are located in Tracy.
102- "just deserts" is correct. In this context, "desert" means something deserved. "Just deserveds" is just too weird, so we stick with the archaic usage.
Speaking of "just" as an adjective, try explaining to lay people the idea that "just compensation" as required by the Constitution means the amount of compensation that would achieve justice, not the bare minimum that the government can get away with. (Yes, I’m ending my sentence with a preposition. I’m invoking the insomnia exception.)
r€nato
@geemoney:
it’s understandable to get that one wrong. "Desert" has a 2nd meaning beyond ‘a dry, hot expanse of land’; it also can mean something you deserve as a reward or as a punishment. It’s an archaic use of the word.
…aaaaaand, Francis beat me to it.
Dennis-SGMM
@r€nato:
LOL! A friend has multiple engineering degrees from MIT. Nothing that touches on science or technology is beyond the realm of his expertise. On the other hand, it took me two days to straighten out his attempt to drywall his garage.
douglasfactors
I wish people would quit writing "as such" when they mean "therefore."
Another pet peeve: "between you and I"
JL
Sew its a mute point that insomnia set in about two, since I fell back asleep at four and woke at eight. lol
r€nato
@Dennis-SGMM:
my ex-father is/was an engineer – a rather accomplished one, actually – and he is infamous in our family for his multiple ham-handed attempts at DIY home renovation projects. My mom divorced him and ended up marrying a guy without a lot of book smarts but he is a world-class mechanic and handyman. He still marvels over how completely incompetent my ex-father was at home repair, when he occasionally comes across yet another project he fucked up.
His utter inability to competently execute any sort of home project was compounded by his habit of doing things in as cheap a manner as possible, which almost always led to the need to do it all over again, which of course ended up costing him more time and about as much money (if not more) as it would have had he done it correctly the first time around without trying to pinch every penny possible.
kommrade reproductive vigor
have’nt red all the comments so my apologees if this has allready ben linked.
And don’t get me started about doctors. Yikes.
Limagolf
It’s like John has gotten a Matt Yglesias commentary section transplant!
;-)
/Limagolf
JL
@kommrade reproductive vigor: Thank you!
SLKRR
The one I hate the most is "should of" in place of "should’ve." Arrrgggh!
The funniest that I ever saw was on another blog where a guy persisted in using the word "amagion" – as in the title of a famous John Lennon song.
passerby
I echo those who are bugged by the use of a noun as a verb. Birthed and birthing, gifted and gifting–argh, I refuse to use them.
As for the use of homonyms and incorrectly conjugated verbs, whether careless or ignorant, I’ve been practicing letting go of that programming. There’s so much more carelessness and ignorance on a behavioral and mental level in our society that the use/misuse of the English seems like a harmless symptom. After all, we usually know what’s trying to be communicated.
My mother drilled good grammar into us by unfailingly correcting our speech. Obsessively. She was good at helping us compose term papers and reports for school. But, I knew I had a problem when one day I corrected the grammar of my best friend’s mother (I was about 11 years old). I did it as a reflex, without thinking. I haven’t forgotten the look on her face when it happened and knew that it was just so rude. I was never so embarrassed as I was at that moment.
So even now, when reading or listening to what others have written or said, and even though I’m acutely aware of the errors in spelling and grammar, I pretend to ignore it. It’s not for me to correct them. It’s a curse and I’ve strive to let myself off the hook, too, ever afraid of getting it wrong and being corrected.
Good luck to those who have to teach proper grammar and composition in this day and age. u may b fighting a loozing battle with the culture of texting and anonymous blog commenting.
How much does it really matter anyway?
passerby
"“Has Spencer released his list yet? Everybody’s waiting with bated breath,” asked Sanders, an independent from Vermont…"
From a Yahoo News article about a congressman’s "S 0 cialist" list.
Careless? or ignorant? You make the call.
Tattoosydney
My pet peeve is a redundancy – people who say "4am in the morning" make me (briefly) contemplate murder.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@John D.:
It’s an overly fancy way to say "used".
Grumpy Code Monkey
@passerby:
Correct, AFAICT.
John PM
I cannot believe that no one has mentioned the use of the word "goes" in place of the word "says":
"I was talking to Sally yesterday, and she goes ‘You wouldn’t believe what Tammy did.’" So I went, "What did she do?" and Sally goes "blah, blah….."
My wife does this all the time and it drives me crazy. However, in the interest of preserving our marriage (and my life), I no longer address it. Instead, I just tune her out, which I think has been working.
I was a teaching assistant for legal writing my final year of law school. I could not believe how many people were able to progress through high school and college without being able to write a coherent sentence. My favorite mistake of all time was when one of my students used the word "learned" in place of the word "taught," which resulted in the following sentence: "I learned him how to use the product properly."
NonWonderDog
@passerby:
Huh? That’s correct usage. "Bated," archaic form of "abated," meaning "shortened." (I think it’s one of the words Shakespeare made up, when "abated" didn’t fit the meter.)
"Baited" breath would mean you’ve been eating anchovies or something.
passerby
@NonWonderDog and GrumpyMonkeyCode:
Oh. Well, in that case, with regard to myself I took the bait: Careless? or Ignorant? Looks like ignorant. I stand corrected (I learn something everyday).
Also, I learned today about just desertz.
Interrobang
The local yokels here have this horrible accent where "accept" and "except" are homophones, and just about anything else with an x in it is pronounced with a soft g sound, like "eggzackly," and, when they say it, "across" ends with a t. Not only that, but the local yokels have no idea what "ignorant" means, and use it frequently as a synonym for "rude" or "impolite," as the fellow who once informed me "Someone wrote something ignorant on the men’s room wall." It was about all I could do not to say, "Like what? ‘The earth is flat’?!" This also makes "ignorant" into some kind of vile insult, which is unbearable, since it’s about the only accurate descriptor for many things. *sigh*
The more educated people here don’t tend to do this, although we do have a bit of a blurring with d/t in the medial position, so minimal pairs "shutter" and "shudder" may wind up being too close for non-speakers of the regional dialect to distinguish. That apparently drives some people crazy, but it doesn’t much bother me. (I’m from here; I can hear the difference every time, and if not, I can listen for context.)
Cyrus
@nnyhav: Thanks, I was going to mention rein/reign too, but you beat me to it.
@John D.: "Pre-owned" is a euphemism for "used." As far as that goes, so what, euphemisms are all over the place. The problem is, "pre-owned" is a particularly glaring and clumsy euphemism because it’s longer than what it’s replacing, and more awkward phonetically (this part is entirely subjective, obviously), and it can be confusing because that prefix is sometimes used differently. When a credit card offer says that you’re "pre-approved" but you still have to fill out a form and it’s uncertain whether you’ll get a card, "pre-approved" means that the approval process has not happened yet. In "pre-owned," though, the ownership process has happened. Although that’s a better reason to be irked by "pre-approved" than by "pre-owned," (which I am) because as I hunt for examples I think the "pre-owned" usage is more common.
@John PM: All this has happened before… There was a "Peanuts" strip about that very topic. One character tells a story to another using "goes" like that several times, and the punchline is, the listener asks "Whatever happened to ‘said’?"
As for societal collapse, I get that we live in insane times, but I’m pretty sure every generation has imagined their own time as more important than it actually was. There has always been religious doomsaying, and science-based apocalypses have been foreseen for more than 200 years now, ever since Thomas Malthus.
Svensker
@passerby:
E
That’s actually correct, unless you’re talking about a fish…
Svensker
Why don’t I have permish to edit my comment? @Interrobang:
That actually sounds sort of regionally charming. The shutter/shudder thing drives me crazy tho — I’m seeing more and more people write one for the other, as in "I got new shudders for my windows", which sounds very creepy.
And the lie/lay thing drives me bonkers, but that battle is done, over, kaput, deceased, finito. If you lay down with illiterates, your likely to raise up with flea’s.
roseyv
I don’t know who you are, but you spelled "apall" correctly, and so I love you. In fact, you are approximately the only person I have ever known to spell the world "apall" correctly in the last twenty years, and so you will now go on my Christmas card list forever.
It was the first time that the correctly-spelled "apall" triggered the spellcheck in Microsoft word ("Did you mean ‘appall?’" Um, no I most certainly did not) that I first realized we were probably doomed as a culture.
JR
I don’t know that anyone can convince a person sitting at Hartsfield that civilization isn’t collapsing. That’s like trying to convince a guy at a day care center that nobody’s having kids anymore. When evidence to the contrary surrounds your audience, your arguments will never sink in.
Pootus
"Rediculous"
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Cyrus:
Well, there’s another facet of the whole "pre-owned" thing that makes it particularly egregious.
Ordinary (read: poor) people buy "used" cars, "used" furniture, "used" clothing, etc. Special people buy "pre-owned" cars, "pre-owned" furniture, "pre-owned" clothing, etc. The term "pre-owned" exists solely to salve the egos of those who wouldn’t be caught dead buying anything "used" but can’t afford to buy the new shit.
Matthew B.
@r€nato:
Sorry, Renato, the Merriam-Webster Usage Guide does say that less is always acceptable with countables. "[L]ess refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured and to number among things that are counted." Nothing about restricting it to measurable quantities such as gallons of water. And it carefully explains why it takes that position; that BBC page you linked to gives no justification for its own argument, for the simple reason that it can’t.
Of course the nuances and the usage patterns of less and fewer are a little different. No one’s disagreeing with that.
rachel
@Zuzu’s Petals: "Interface"is too a verb: "I don’t have enough pellon to interface this collar, so I will have to use organza."
Matthew B.
@CD:
While I’m at it … Over in the sense of more than, as in over $5000, goes back about seven centuries and is completely standard English.