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 am irrationally irritated when people describe something as “addicting” rather than “addictive”. I’m not even sure it’s technically incorrect, and language is a fluid thing so this shouldn’t irritate me. But I still have to consciously tell myself to not be annoyed by it.
That counts; the quirk doesn’t even necessarily have to be “wrong” to be annoying to an individual.
In my defense I don’t think I’ve ever actually corrected anybody, I just stew inside my own skull
I’ve given up on trying to correct people for the most part because language does change over time and new norms are established whether or not I’m comfortable with them. Sure, some of them are clumsy and staggeringly incorrect (like “conscious” being used in place of “conscience”) but if it’s done enough times, it’ll become the expected way to communicate.
It feels like an Americanism to me. I pretty much only see it on the internet
English had a big French spelling phase, so a bunch of our words have entirely different phonetic sounds vs their spelling. I constantly mess this up. Go ahead, make me spell bourgoise or bureacracy the first time. Nope failed again! Conscious/Conscience are definitely in that category.
For me I’m not sure if Math or Maths are correct
You’re not a real leftist if you can spell bourgeiouiuiouiise on the first try
First off, amazing username.
Anyway, a tip to spell bourgeoisie that someone here recommended was to sing it to the tune of the Mickey Mouse song. Which, embarrassingly, is the only way I can spell it.
B O U … R G E … O I S I E! Bourgeoisie! Bourgeoisie! Who steals the surplus value from you and me? B O U R G E O I S I E!
And then yeah if you need bourgeois just lop off the final I E
Intellectuals are haram. Ask Gramsci.
Me with a time machine: going back and shooting William the Bastard in the head to save the English language
Fun page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences
North Americans contract ‘mathematics’ to ‘math’, most other places shorten it to ‘maths’. I don’t even know if one is more “correct” or if the entire word ‘mathematics’ was a mistake. Honestly, the North Americans might be right about this one.
I really hate the misuse of the word “pretentious.” A lot of people use it to mean something like “pompous” when it’s root is “pretense.” It’s only pretentious if someone is dissembling about how much they know about something. If someone actually knows as much about a subject as the appear to then it doesn’t matter how annoying they are, it’s still not pretentious.
And that’s my very specific pet peeve. And having this opinion is itself extremely annoying, but it’s still not pretentious goddamnit
I dance that line a fair bit and while I usually mean the correct version, the one involving pretense and implications of some bigger grander something that isn’t actually there, I may have annoyed you in the past by being too fast and loose with how I used it in the past. Sorry!
A pretense doesn’t have to be in relation to knowledge that someone holds. A pretense could be someone acting as if they’re more dignified or esteemed than they are, which is practically the definition of pompous.
I believe everyone should have the right to dignity no matter who they are
A bit pretentious eh?
Fun fact, pretentious and pretense are separated by more than 300 years.
Corpo-speak e-mails from bloviating, self-important middle managers who regurgitate such turns of phrase as “at this time” and/or “in a timely manor [sic]” make my eye twitch. I can overlook a lot of the “synergizing our thought leaders with operational tempo” jargon salad, but the aforementioned phrases trigger my fight-or-flight response, probably because they reek of petty tyrant small business night manager mentality and bring me back to the headspace of dealing with bosses like that when I was a kid.
I also once had to work with an IT project manager who insisted on pronouncing the word “processes” as if it had a long-E vowel sound in the plural (“pro-cess-eez”). It would derail my train of thought every fucking time.
Also also once had a direct supervisor who would throw around “irregardless” almost daily.
run the gambit
when they mean
run the gamut
Maybe it’s because I’ve been familiar with color gamut since like Photoshop 5 or something. And I know people that really likely know the gamut word but they just got the telephone version of the phrase at some point I guess.
There’s the saying about how if someone mispronounces a word, it likely means they learned it by reading.
So I try not to get too uptight about this stuff. I remember when I first read ‘clandestine’ and my brain just assigned it ‘candle-stine’ as the pronunciation. And then there’s just tons of accepted variations on some words as well.
But ya, I think FF7 contributed significantly to ‘run the gambit’ becoming so common in use.
I admit I find “Rickyisms” funny. They get two birds stoned at once, though I doubt Ricky learned them from reading.
That’s me! Read way more than I talked and so sounded very strange trying to say the new words I learned
