BS: Language Pet Peeves

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 31 Jul 19 - 02:33 PM

She died of a fever and noone could save her rhymes because fever as pronounced... Not written... Fayver.

When I sing it, I sing it as written and make no attempt to force a rhyme by pretending I am "oirish".    -ver and her are enough of a rhyme for me.

DC

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 31 Jul 19 - 12:34 PM

Had she been overweight at her funeral they could have made it rhyme: "She died of the fever and no-one could heave her..."

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 31 Jul 19 - 12:26 PM

Ooh and how about people writing dialect phonetically... She died of a fever and noone could save her rhymes because fever as pronounced... Not written... Fayver.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 27 Jul 19 - 12:47 PM

Thanks!

I just learned about the Great Meteor Hotspot. How exciting to learn that a hotspot, which I usually associate with faraway places and tropical climes, has left volcanic remnants and low mountains across eastern Canada and New England, then gone across the northern Atlantic.

The name is flashy, but it turns out to come from the name of the German research vessel which discovered the last seamount in the chain. The vessel was named the Meteor.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 27 Jul 19 - 10:06 AM

You go, leeneia!

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 27 Jul 19 - 05:24 AM

Pointless distinctions are only pointless if they're pointless, not if they're useful.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: BobL
Date: 27 Jul 19 - 03:26 AM

Like many technical terms, the fine differences are perhaps unimportant outside the discipline concerned. Short, long and metric tons. Dray, cart and race horses. And you'd be surprised how many different versions of the mile there are.

But did the Gloster Meteor jet aircraft become a Meteorite if it crashed?

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 26 Jul 19 - 12:23 PM

Don't you grasp the concept of rebellion? I am rebelling against the pointless distinctions. I have the right - I have a meteor in my rock collection.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 25 Jul 19 - 05:52 PM

Welcome, but sorry sweetie, a meteor is in the air and a meteorite is on the ground, Steve is right about that. Jargon rather than English...

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 25 Jul 19 - 02:40 PM

I don't buy it, Steve. Wherever it is, it's the same thing, a lump of rock. Using all those different names for meteors is like using different names for a horse that's in the stall, a horse that's galloping, and a horse in a photograph.
==========
I have another peeve. Words like (gawd I can hardly type it) labradoodle. i.e., hybrid names for crosses between dog breeds which never should have been crossed. Peekapoo, for heaven's sake!

My brother once owned a dog which was a cross between two kinds of spaniel. One was bred to point game birds, the other to jump into water and retrieve game birds. The result was that when the dog saw a bird, it suffered something like a mild seizure, unable to figure out what to do - to point or to jump.
=============
Mrzzy, thanks for the confirmation.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 24 Jul 19 - 06:30 PM

Leeneia, I wish you hadn't mentioned Massive. It is *everywhere,* I now see.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 24 Jul 19 - 11:22 AM

Someone scrawled an explicative on the statue of Lee in Charlottesville...

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 22 Jul 19 - 08:38 AM

Ok check this: puppie. Really. As in the singular of puppies.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 22 Jul 19 - 06:24 AM

But that isn't right. The distinctions are useful. A meteoroid is a small lump of rock in the solar system. How small? "Anything smaller than an asteroid" is as close as you'll get. A meteorite is one of those lumps of rock that has made it as far as the ground. A meteor is the same thing as a shooting star, the momentary streak of light from a small lump of rock, more likely a grain or speck of dust, that we see burning up as it rushes into the atmosphere. There is no such thing as a meteor on the ground or in a museum. They're meteorites every time.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 22 Jul 19 - 12:21 AM

Yes, I believe I have. I suppressed the memory.
==================
I have decided to ignore the experts who distinguish meteors, meteorites and meteoroids.

From now on, for me a rock that you see in the sky or a rock that has fallen from the sky is a meteor.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Lighter
Date: 21 Jul 19 - 04:03 PM

Leeneia, ever hear "fur child," "fur kid," or "fur baby"?

I suppose they could be applied to hamsters and the like as well as to cats and dogs.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Thompson
Date: 21 Jul 19 - 02:31 AM

And the way parts of speech are leaking, so people who mean respectful say respectable, and similar leaks across other words.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 20 Jul 19 - 05:24 AM

Speaking of massive, a much-misused word is "enormity." And what about "epoch-making"? And don't get me started on alternative/alternate. I blame the Monkees.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 20 Jul 19 - 03:48 AM

And the sappy language of the pet-rescue world.

mom, dad = owner
sister = fellow female dog
forever home

Ten years ago the house next door had a bad fire. A neighbor pounded on our door in the middle of the night and woke us up. Our houses are only eight feet apart, and the smoke and flames were terrifying. I called the cat, but she had hidden herself somewhere. I had to leave her.

I never would have left a child, but the cat was not my child, and I wasn't her mom.

After half an hour, the firefighters told me I could go back in my house, and I found the cat, put her in a crate, and sat in the car with her on my lap till it was almost over.

When people refer to me as my cat's mom, I wonder if they have any idea of the dedication which parenthood demands.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 20 Jul 19 - 03:37 AM

I'm getting tired of massive

massive landslide
massive attack
massive explosion.

'Massive' seems to have replaced 'awesome' as the adjective meaning 'rather noticeable'.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 19 Jul 19 - 10:21 PM

Ooh JoeF, excellent. Also all other psychological jargon being misused.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Joe_F
Date: 19 Jul 19 - 09:32 PM

Revolver words

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Lighter
Date: 19 Jul 19 - 01:29 PM

I first heard to "incent" in 2006.

It's all too real.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: meself
Date: 16 Jul 19 - 11:18 PM

It just seemed a little ironic in the context.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 16 Jul 19 - 02:38 PM

Newspapers, radio news. Not those of us who read/listen to them!

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: meself
Date: 16 Jul 19 - 11:23 AM

"Newsies"?

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 16 Jul 19 - 10:56 AM

Newsies make things up to peeve me. Watch me verb that noun.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: BobL
Date: 16 Jul 19 - 02:42 AM

I didn't even know it was a word.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 15 Jul 19 - 09:04 AM

Today incent was a verb.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 12 Jul 19 - 12:31 PM

Video shows Coast Guard leaping onto submarine carrying 17,000 pounds of cocaine

Wow.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 12 Jul 19 - 08:59 AM

The phrase "the cold vacuum of space" in any article on science.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 11 Jul 19 - 11:01 AM

Staunch is not stanch, either.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 10 Jul 19 - 05:38 PM

Probably, but then there is a possible un-scanning rhyme with Boris!

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 08 Jul 19 - 08:50 PM

Are you talking about the man who's his own Cockney rhyming slang? As with James Blunt??

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 08 Jul 19 - 06:32 PM

Anatomical misnomers: as described by Mrzzy above, and also the common misuse of the other part of female anatomy, so often these days erroneously applied to anyone of either gender that one does not like/agree with one's own views: i.e. that one which rhymes with a certain PM candidate. Cannae bring masel' tae type it oot, but ye'll ken whit ah mean!

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Charmion
Date: 08 Jul 19 - 11:10 AM

I was listening to a podcast about philosophy the other day, but turned it off the third time the reader said "tenants" when the script (I hope) meant "tenets".

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: mayomick
Date: 08 Jul 19 - 09:25 AM

My neighbour and his friends were out camping in the Dublin mountains last week .They all got eaten alive by midgets .

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 07 Jul 19 - 08:47 PM

Hah!

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 07 Jul 19 - 04:55 PM

Why are you fannying around with stuff like that, Mrrzy? :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 07 Jul 19 - 03:42 PM

Oh, and the terms vulva and vagina are neither synonymous nor interchangeable.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 05 Jul 19 - 01:42 PM

He was brung up proper then!

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 05 Jul 19 - 06:27 AM

Some time in the 1960s, my school's prize night, Bolton town hall, pompous mayor of Bolton in closing speech (imagine broad Bolton accent): "I've found this evenin' to 'ave bin most educative..."

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Tattie Bogle
Date: 04 Jul 19 - 06:06 PM

Heard on Radio Scotland tonight, said by a senior health (infection control)official: "It is absolutely incredulous that we would open this hospital....."
It is incredIBLE
I am incredULOUS

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 04 Jul 19 - 05:13 PM

Leenia, I am so with you on former/latter. Violates the Don't Make Your Reader Work rule.

And I don't mind language changing, I just wish somebody had told me when edgy went from meaning nervous to pushing the envelope (an expression I hate but what is better?)!

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 04 Jul 19 - 04:07 PM

'respectively'

Jack fell down and broke his crown,
and Jill came tumbling after, respectively.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 04 Jul 19 - 04:05 PM

Using the terms former and latter, so I have to re-read to see which is which. Like Rabbit, who got frustrated trying to count how many pockets he would need to carry his young in, I haven't the time.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 03 Jul 19 - 09:29 AM

I remember someone asking me out loud How do you pronounce root? I said root. Turned out she meant route, which I pronounce rout.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 03 Jul 19 - 12:39 AM

Many people are inconsistent in their pronunciation of "route." On YouTube videos about pronunciation, they say that a highway is called a "root", but that in the stock phrase "If you want to go that route..." they make it rhyme with "out".

Such people are from both sides of the pond. I do it too.

Long ago there was a TV show called "Root 66." I bet its theme song had a lot to do with the preference for the oo sound today.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 02 Jul 19 - 11:29 AM

Charmion, me too.

Speaking of there being only two of things, it bugs me if people use Both or (N)Either for larger groups. As in, both rhinos, deer and goats have horns. Argh.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Charmion
Date: 02 Jul 19 - 09:20 AM

Clueless Don, if I were writing about the world's last two anything, that fact about them would surely be worth a comment more precise than "almost unique". For example: "The last two white rhinoceroses in the world met yesterday in Kruger National Park. Unfortunately, both of them are male."

The French loan word "route" generates other problems in Canada, where we live with inexorable cultural pressure from our southern neighbours. We still use the French pronunciation, a homonym of the verb "root", as noted by David Carter(UK). Americans pronounce it as a homonym of "rout", which I understand as a verb that means "scour", "extract" or "put to flight" and is most often applied to defeated armies.

A piece of computer equipment called a "router", so called because it directs wireless signals to the correct receiving device, is American in origin (like most computer equipment), and is therefore pronounced like what happens to defeated armies. Unfortunately, this confuses people (like me) who (a) know what the thing does; and, (b) know about power tools, including the machine carpenters use to make fancy edges on boards and molding.

I wish that were my only problem with the United States of America.