Commonly misunderstood phrases that annoy you

[Lemmingwiser]

I'll throw up a couple myself.

"That's the exception that proves the rule!". People say this when someone gives an example disproving their claim. Like, I might say, no woman has ever had an abortion after 3 months when there's no medical indication to do so. You might give a commonly known case where a woman did exactly that. And I say "Well that's the exception that proves the rule."

The phrase "the exception that proves the rule" comes from situations where you have a sign like "Walking on grass permitted on sundays". That is an exception that proves that there normally is a rule that you're not allowed to walk on the grass.

--

It's both funny and annoying that "literally" now means both "literally" and "figuratively".

--

"Blood is thicker than water". Some harpy kept using this on a friend of mine to argue that family was more important than anything else. But the phrase originally means almost the opposite. The original quote is "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". It's about bonds forged by battle or other shared experiences are stronger than those of the family.

edit: I got corrected here:

Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, author Albert Jack and Messianic minister Richard Pustelniak, claim that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by "the water of the womb", thus "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". Neither of the authors cites any sources to support his claim.

 

[Pee Cola]

"I could care less".

I can't put into words how much disdain I have for this phrase, so I'll let an angry Britbong do it for me.

 

[CryoRevival #SJ-112]

David Mitchells Soapbox: The Thread

 

[HeyYou]

People not understanding the difference between i.e. and e.g. I get English has way too many Latin abbreviations but i.e. and e.g. mean completely different things.

 

[VF-1S Valkyrie]

Bury the lead/bury the lede. Both are correct usage and US/UK arguments over one being right and the other being wrong are retarded.

'The lead' refers in US journalism to the overall thrust of a story, where it should be 'leading' the reader's line of inquiry. 'Burying the lead' refers to hiding an inconvenient line of inquriy behind the bulk of an article leading in another direction.

'The lede' refers to the actual first sentence in the article. 'Burying the lede' similarly refers to using the bulk of an article to guide the reader away from inconvenient points of info that can't be omitted.

If anything, the argument is that 'bury the lead' more accurately refers to the action in question while 'bury the lede' could be misinterperated as actually slicing off the top paragraph and physically burying it in the ground, but that's a huge stretch; both versions of the phrase are correct.

 

[WinRAR Free Trial]

POV: You're a commonly misused abbreviation

 

[Lemmingwiser]

POV: You're a commonly misused abbreviation

Reminds of the cringe I felt when I read "TFW when I feel good"

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

"Blood is thicker than water". Some harpy kept using this on a friend of mine to argue that family was more important than anything else. But the phrase originally means almost the opposite. The original quote is "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". It's about bonds forged by battle or other shared experiences are stronger than those of the family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water

Writing in the 1990s and 2000s, author Albert Jack and Messianic minister Richard Pustelniak, claim that the original meaning of the expression was that the ties between people who have made a blood covenant (or have shed blood together in battle) were stronger than ties formed by "the water of the womb", thus "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". Neither of the authors cites any sources to support his claim.

 

[Testacles Maximus]

"Nice guys finish last."

The original quote was about a baseball team, not being an angry virgin.

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

mfw when

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Youtube essayists are barely literate retards almost without exception, but one that is very common and particularly annoys me whenever I hear it is "can't be understated".

No, you're trying to say "can't be OVERstated" as in there are no words in existence that are too extreme to describe something. It's not "I'd like to understate this for some reason, but I'm just too duty-bound to the truth" or something faggy like that. Imagine having so little grasp of your native language.

 

[A-Stump]

Not a phrase but

'Decimated'

People use it when they mean to say obliterated and it has always annoyed me.

 

[skykiii]

Whole video is about this stuff. It mentions "the blood thicker than water" one but also "customer is always right" and "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

I share the feelings of those who hate how "literally" has been mangled.

Incidentally has anyone else here ever had the phenomenon of you actually are using a word correctly, then some dumbass comes and "corrects" you?

 

[gobbles]

People use it when they mean to say obliterated and it has always annoyed me.

I recently saw “decimated” used in a somewhat formal, i.e. professional, context when the data itself was merely halved. I couldn’t tell if they were taking the piss, but I don’t think so.

 

[Otterly]

Could care less is really annoying

Addicting being used instead of addictive

Verbs and nouns and adjectives being mangled. For example the use of the word overweight. People ARE overweight. Overweight is a descriptive word. I’m now seeing it used like ‘people with overweight or obesity.’ You do not ‘have overweight.’ You are overweight.
Other things like this you see a lot now. Someone doesn’t get a medal or win a medal, they talk about ‘bob medalling in the 100m’

I think all this is down to people not reading any more. When you see the correct use of grammar again and again as you read you ‘get’ it even if you’re the cursed generation that never got taught grammar at school (curse you 1970s school liberals.)

 

[skykiii]

You do not ‘have overweight.’ You are overweight.

Now I'm tempted to run a D&D campaign where there's a macguffin literally called "The Overweight" just to see if it bothers people.

 

[vanilla_pepsi_head]

I think all this is down to people not reading any more. When you see the correct use of grammar again and again as you read you ‘get’ it even if you’re the cursed generation that never got taught grammar at school (curse you 1970s school liberals.)

Very true, as someone who reads a fucking ton, it's a pretty regular occurrence that some ten-dollar word comes completely naturally to me when I'm typing something, but it's not a word I've ever actually used and I have no clue how I know it or why it popped into my head that it would be appropriate. A lot of the time I end up second guessing myself and checking the definition to make sure it means what I (apparently) think it means. It basically always turns out that it does, which speaks to how much information one can absorb and make sense of from context clues alone, as an entirely subconscious process. The flipside to this is that it's not infrequent for me to disastrously mispronounce one of these words without thinking about it enough to realize I've only ever come across it in print and it never occurred to me to check the pronunciation, so I end up looking like an absolute retard.

Anyway, "for all intensive purposes" and "should/would/could of" make my teeth itch.

 

[Jarch6]

"I could care less".

"for all intensive purposes"

Were the two ones that came to mind for being quite common. Not a phrase, but incorrect nominative pronoun (i.e., him and me did X as opposed to He and I did X) was one my grandmother always pointed out. "Begging the question" is often used in the vernacular to mean "invites the following question" rather than the original philosophical meaning of "argument guilty of (sometimes obfuscated) circular reasoning," not necessarily wrong given the meaning of "begs" but this difference in usage can lead to confusion.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

I'm gay. It means happy.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Could care less is really annoying

Addicting being used instead of addictive

Verbs and nouns and adjectives being mangled. For example the use of the word overweight. People ARE overweight. Overweight is a descriptive word. I’m now seeing it used like ‘people with overweight or obesity.’ You do not ‘have overweight.’ You are overweight.
Other things like this you see a lot now. Someone doesn’t get a medal or win a medal, they talk about ‘bob medalling in the 100m’

I think all this is down to people not reading any more. When you see the correct use of grammar again and again as you read you ‘get’ it even if you’re the cursed generation that never got taught grammar at school (curse you 1970s school liberals.)

I hear people say shit like "I am malnutrition". No you're not, you're malnourished. You're not the personification of malnutrition.