Grammar and language issues that drive you utterly berserk - Pet peeves

  • 🔧 Actively working on site again.
Misspelling of Canon and cannon.
Taking shots with a Canon.
screenshot1.jpg
Taking shots with a cannon.
screenshot2.jpg
 
  • Like
  • Feels
Reactions: Biggie Smalls' Taint, Baraadmirer, Cranky Old Broad and 2 others
Rozzy said:
Misspelling of Canon and cannon.
Taking shots with a Canon.
View attachment 5875349
Taking shots with a cannon.
View attachment 5875352
Click to expand...
But also lowercase canon (not cannon):
  1. A generally accepted principle; a rule.
    • The trial must proceed according to the canons of law.
  2. a formally codified set of criteria deemed mandatory for a particular artistic style of figurative art.
    • the Canon of Polykleitos
  3. A group of literary works that are generally accepted as representing a field.
  4. The works of a writer that have been accepted as authentic.
    • the entire Shakespearean canon
  5. A eucharistic prayer, particularly the Roman Canon.
  6. A religious law or body of law decreed by the church.
    • We must proceed according to canon law.
  7. A catalogue of saints acknowledged and canonized in the Roman Catholic Church.
  8. In monasteries, a book containing the rules of a religious order.
  9. A piece of music in which the same melody is played by different voices, but beginning at different times; a round.
    • Pachelbel’s Canon has become very popular.
  10. (fandom slang) Those sources, especially including literary works, which are considered part of the main continuity regarding a given fictional universe.
    • A spin-off book series revealed the aliens to be originally from Earth, but it's not canon.
 
  • Like
Reactions: MerriedxReldnahc and Pagan Min
Wot Zit Too Yah0996 said:
People who pronounce 'mischievous' as 'miss-chee-vee-us'... What the fuck happened?
Click to expand...
This is unfortunately not new. Have heard it my entire (relatively long) life. I think it is actually better now than it used to be.

AnOminous said:
I like how Finnegans Wake basically just said fuck apostrophes and didn't use them at all.
Click to expand...
Joyce, like Hemingway and e e cummings and others, was entitled to disregard conventional rules because he (they) had earned it. Those folks knew the rules but were doing something (love it or hate it, it was deliberate and had a point). That's worlds way from not knowing.

There can also be less overtly stylized ways to invert or disregard grammar rules, and accomplished authors beyond Modernists have toyed with grammar for artistic or stylistic purposes, too:

On a page of [Don] DeLillo’s 1982 novel, The Names, [David Foster] Wallace writes with his red and green pens: “D doesn’t use commas between independent clauses—only uses ‘and.’ See p. 19. Why? It gives narrative a more oral quality—We never hear this comma.”
Click to expand...

That choice, much like, say, choosing to list a string of things each connected by "and," rather than standard correct English of commas and then a conjunction before the final item (just a random example, but a style choice I make from time to time, so I'm partial), can convey tone, mood, situation, etc. But in my world where I am dictator, you only get to do that once you've mastered the conventional rules.

Cranky Old Broad said:
Weary vs. wary. Weary refers to exhaustion and wary refers to watchfulness or caution. This seems to crop up a lot in YouTube videos and it will always cause me to grumble under my breathe, “It’s wary, you nitwit.”
Click to expand...
I think people also confuse those with "leery." I've seen "leary" many times online, which I think is a double confusion of wary/ weary and wary ("weary")/ leery. :cryblood:


Thread tax:
"Verbiage": It's not "verbage," either in spelling or pronunciation. Ages ago I was responsible for a big project had acquired the term as a sort of byword. And NONE of the 50 million people involved said it correctly. The experience damaged my brain to the point that I now have to look it up bc I'm afraid I'm remembering it wrong (or I just opt to avoid it). This is Grammar Trauma!

Also: relating to an entity that you hire to perform work on your behalf and that may be seen by your ultimate audience as "you": "third party" and "third-party."

Correct:
"The company uses third parties to handle technical support."
"The company reviews its third-party engagements annually."

Incorrect:
"The company has many third party contracts."
"The company terminated its contracts with all third-parties."

Compound (2+ word) noun: no hyphen
Compound adjective: hyphen*

*not a 100%-of-the-time (swidt?) rule, but mostly, and definitely for "third" and "party" together

If I had to pick all hyphen or no hyphen to reduce confusion, I'd pick "none," as it is cleaner, more modern, and less like to result in errors.

But the conventional rule (and my employer's correct formal guidance that even some of our technical writers have very wrong (kill me)) is noun - no, adjective - yes. Simple.
 
  • Like
  • Thunk-Provoking
  • Winner
Reactions: The Last Stand, Cranky Old Broad, Lowlife Adventures and 1 other person
I can't believe that I've only just found this thread. I've sperged about these kind of things before and I'm sure that someone has brought it up in the thread already, but it drives me insane how so many people online don't seem to know how to use the words "woman/women" properly.

On rare occasions I'll see this done for the male counterpart, but there's like a 25% chance that if someone is talking about a woman they'll call her a "women" and I don't understand how this happens so much (can't even blame it all on ESLs either since I'll regularly see this coming from people who are clearly native English speakers.)
 
  • Like
  • Feels
  • Winner
Reactions: Biggie Smalls' Taint, pork and beans, Cranky Old Broad and 1 other person
@Friend of Dorothy Parker Even still, it seems to be one of those "fashionable" revived usages that people use to sound more clever/sophisticated/well-read than they really are. Miss-chee-vee-us is smug and pretentious sounding, like the speaker is trying to sound vaguely scholarly, or some shit.
 
Wot Zit Too Yah0996 said:
@Friend of Dorothy Parker Even still, it seems to be one of those "fashionable" revived usages that people use to sound more clever/sophisticated/well-read than they really are. Miss-chee-vee-us is smug and pretentious sounding, like the speaker is trying to sound vaguely scholarly, or some shit.
Click to expand...
Oh, I wasn't saying that that's the correct pronunciation - and even if it was a variant hundreds of years ago, I 100% doubt anyone pronouncing it with 4 syllables today is trying to be deliberately medieval - 99.9999% they just don't know the word. :biggrin:
 
  • Like
Reactions: Wot Zit Too Yah0996
Friend of Dorothy Parker said:
Oh, I wasn't saying that that's the correct pronunciation - and even if it was a variant hundreds of years ago, I 100% doubt anyone pronouncing it with 4 syllables today is trying to be deliberately medieval - 99.9999% they just don't know the word. :biggrin:
Click to expand...
Meh, who knows, really. There is a pretentiousness about it, though.
 
  • Thunk-Provoking
Reactions: Friend of Dorothy Parker
Wot Zit Too Yah0996 said:
Meh, who knows, really. There is a pretentiousness about it, though.
Click to expand...
While the word sometimes used to have the stress on the second syllable (back in the 1700s and earlier), four syllables has never been a normal thing and there's no basis for it in history that I know of. It's just wrong.

"Octopi" as a plural for "octopus." It's not Latin. It's Greek and would be "octopodes" if you're speaking English and so pretentious you borrow pluralization from another language for an English word. I won't say it really drives me berserk, because even caring about it is pretentious, and people are going to keep using "octopi" anyway. I'm still going to use "octopuses."

One that's correct but annoying is insisting on saying "It is I" outside of some formal situation. "It's me" is fine no matter how "wrong" it is. "It is I" is almost "I am a faggot." I don't know why that bugs me, since "Cathy and I went to the store" doesn't bother me, perhaps because that the worst is the subject is much more clear. You would normally say "Cathy went to the store" or "I went to the store" so using "and" between them feels normal. It feels affected to say "It is I."
 
  • Like
  • Winner
Reactions: Hinttitroniikka, Wot Zit Too Yah0996 and a hapless toad
AnOminous said:
While the word sometimes used to have the stress on the second syllable (back in the 1700s and earlier), four syllables has never been a normal thing and there's no basis for it in history that I know of. It's just wrong.

"Octopi" as a plural for "octopus." It's not Latin. It's Greek and would be "octopodes" if you're speaking English and so pretentious you borrow pluralization from another language for an English word. I won't say it really drives me berserk, because even caring about it is pretentious, and people are going to keep using "octopi" anyway. I'm still going to use "octopuses."

One that's correct but annoying is insisting on saying "It is I" outside of some formal situation. "It's me" is fine no matter how "wrong" it is. "It is I" is almost "I am a faggot." I don't know why that bugs me, since "Cathy and I went to the store" doesn't bother me, perhaps because that the worst is the subject is much more clear. You would normally say "Cathy went to the store" or "I went to the store" so using "and" between them feels normal. It feels affected to say "It is I."
Click to expand...
I have a (I class it as this, anyway) similar attitude to people who criticise people for not using the word whom, in place of who. It does actually depend on the context, or the situation, or... something. My old man, whose ultimate career ambition is to be a teacher of English as a second language, would have an easier time explaining what I'm on about.

I agree with you on the I and me shit, too.
 
  • Feels
Reactions: AnOminous
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back