Yes yes, language changes over time. I’ve heard that mantra for decades and I know it. That doesn’t mean there aren’t language changes that aren’t grating when they become fashionable (and hopefully temporary).
For me, “morals” being used as a crude catch-all application of “morality,” “ethics,” “integrity” or related concepts bothers me. Sentence example: “Maybe if society had morals there wouldn’t be so many minorities in prison.”
An even more annoying otherwise-fluent-speaker modification I see is when “conscious” is used to mean “consciousness” and “conscience” interchangeably. Sentence example: “Single mothers on welfare that steal baby formula have no conscious.” It sounds like they’re saying the shoplifter is not mentally aware of their own actions, not that they’re lacking sufficient “morals” to let their baby starve for the sake of Rules-Based Order™.
There’s others, but those two come up enough recently, with sufficient newness, for me to bring them up here. Some old classic language quirks are so established and entrenched that even though I hate them, bringing them up would likely invite some hatemail and maybe some mystery alt accounts also sending hatemail after that. You know, because they “could care less(sic)” about what I think.
I can’t think of abutting that truly bothers me (languages are always changing and I think that’s neat), but one thing that throws me off because it’s not a feature of my dialect is using “whenever” to also mean “when” (i.e. both reoccurring and momentary), which is found in some Southern dialects (among others). Sometimes the meaning is immediately clear from context, but other times it’s ambiguous and so there’s a jarring moment where my initial analysis suddenly stops making sense and I realize the speaker must have this feature. Not great at coming up with examples, but something like this:
Whenever I took a shower, the water was too hot and I got burned.
In context it would probably be clear that the speaker is talking about a specific event, but in isolation I have to go, “Wait, I doubt that they kept getting burned every time they took a shower…must be momentary”.
Positive anymore (e.g. “I wear these shoes a lot anymore” to mean “I wear these shoes a lot these days”) is kind of similar in terms of vibes, but the meaning is always clear even devoid of context so I just find it cute more than anything.
There’s this other tiny thing which I must have read or watched a video about ages ago (wish I could remember the specific source) that doesn’t annoy me or impair my understanding but I can’t unhear:
Grammatical nitpicking that will permanently adhere to your brain
Since we’re so used to saying the sentence pattern “it’s because […]”, the vast, vast majority of people will also say “the reason is because…”, in essence swapping “it” for the more specific noun phrase “the reason”. It’s such a natural construction that I never noticed it until it was pointed out, but from a prescriptivist grammatical point of view the “because” is redundant and doesn’t fit–it should simply be “the reason is…”, since the clause that follows “because” is itself the reason for whatever you’re explaining. Other than the simple pattern of construction, another explanation is that it’s a sort of emphatic double positive in line with saying “the reason why”–using both “reason” and “why” is redundant, strictly speaking, but it drives home the explanatory function of the utterance. Sometimes you’ll even hear the trifecta: “the reason why is because […]”.
As I said, it doesn’t annoy me at all, but my ears always perk up when I hear the first three words because I’m wondering what the speaker will say. I think easily 95+% of people say the “incorrect” thing, even incredibly bright people with excellent language skills. If I hear the “correct” version, I take it to indicate that the speaker is someone who thinks carefully about their words; doesn’t necessarily mean they actually have useful things to say, but I like to think it’s a tiny window into their personality
I just remembered I pointed this “error” out to my examiner when I was getting a neuropsych eval (normally I’d never do that, but I did it in a playful way because she was evaluating my language skills), which probably contributed to me being formally diagnosed as a turbonerd.
