BS: Language Pet Peeves

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: Mrrzy
Date: 11 Jul 19 - 11:01 AM

Staunch is not stanch, either.

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: 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: 15 Jul 19 - 09:04 AM

Today incent was a verb.

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: 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: meself
Date: 16 Jul 19 - 11:23 AM

"Newsies"?

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 - 11:18 PM

It just seemed a little ironic in the context.

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: Joe_F
Date: 19 Jul 19 - 09:32 PM

Revolver words

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Mrrzy
Date: 27 Jul 19 - 10:06 AM

You go, leeneia!

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: 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: 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: 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: Mrrzy
Date: 31 Jul 19 - 03:09 PM

I can't help but sing in the accent I heard...

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 01 Aug 19 - 12:43 AM

I have a song book published in Ireland which says

She died of a fever
and none could relieve her...

I like it that way.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: BobL
Date: 01 Aug 19 - 02:59 AM

And in the Sans Day Carol we find cross/grass and coal/all, which only rhyme in the West Country.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 01 Aug 19 - 09:50 AM

Fever rhymes with relieve her in an Orosh accent too... Nice.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: leeneia
Date: 03 Aug 19 - 01:26 AM

"Journey" when no one is going anywhere. Started with "your credit journey" from my bank. I just noticed a video on "My ear-stretching journey." I didn't watch; I didn't want to know.

I think I've seen "journey" in other places, too.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 03 Aug 19 - 10:02 AM

Orosh. People who don't proofread, argh!

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 03 Aug 19 - 11:28 AM

People who say "Is it wine o'clock yet?" when what they really mean is "Is the sun below the yardarm yet?""

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 03 Aug 19 - 10:07 PM

Um, above the yardarm?

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Monique
Date: 04 Aug 19 - 02:56 AM

The sun is over the yardarm.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 04 Aug 19 - 03:47 AM

The sun over the yardarm indicates that it's time for the first morning drink. Here in Bude were a moderate lot who don't drink until evening, therefore the saying is modified in order to give us permission for the first evening drink.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 04 Aug 19 - 11:08 AM

Ah. Posh lot.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 04 Aug 19 - 01:00 PM

Ah, 6 PM I see. It's gin o'clock...

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 05 Aug 19 - 11:43 AM

Back to pet peeves:

The lack of understanding that:
"ALL the idiots aren't in the U.S." is not the same as "not all the idiots are in the US".

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: meself
Date: 06 Aug 19 - 02:42 PM

Thank you, Nigel - I thought I was the only one in the world who was seriously bugged by that one. (It seems to have become widespread only in the last few years, hasn't it?)

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Mrrzy
Date: 06 Aug 19 - 03:12 PM

I am wondering about that difference. Latest misuse of After is The plane crashed after landing.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Jeri
Date: 06 Aug 19 - 03:54 PM

Not to nitpick, but...aw hell, to nitpick:
A plane can certainly crash after landing. Plane lands, careens off the runway, and BOOM! Plane lands, flips over, and BOOM! Plane lands, fails in the attempt to perform the Chatanooga double-shuffle, and BOOM!

On the other hand, crashing before landing would be a bit more complicated.

Subject: RE: BS: Language Pet Peeves
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 06 Aug 19 - 04:17 PM

Plane crashing after landing could be with a tree, or a building.
Similarly plane crashing before landing could be with a flock of birds, a drone, or another plane.

But these are exceptions, and rarely what is meant by someone trying to avoid saying either "the plane crashed" or "the plane crash-landed".