The comments on my post about writing dates with or without terminals got me thinking about the way everyone who speaks English reacts strongly to at least one word or point of usage.
The different ways that people write a date seem to excite curiosity without making anyone angry, but sometimes words or expressions evoke annoyance so intense as to constitute rabid aversion. (I’m thinking of the responses provoked by my article on couldn’t care less.)
By a “blackboard moment” I mean a physical reaction similar to what we feel when the teacher’s hand slips and we hear a fingernail scrape against the board.
Here are some of the words, pronunciations, spellings and expressions that produce blackboard moments of various intensities in me. (The preferred form is in parentheses.)
standing on line (standing in line)
light something on fire (set something on fire)
Me and my friends swim. (My friends and I swim.)
in hopes of (in the hope of)
pronouncing the word pecan with a long e and a short a: /pee can/ (instead of with a schwa and the a of father: /pe kahn/)
pronouncing the t in Bill Clinton (he pronounces his name with a glottal stop: /klin?n.)
seperate (separate)
dalmatien (dalmatian)
shepard dog (shepherd dog)
cemetary (cemetery)
it’s tail (its tail)
In that incidence he was right. (In that instance he was right.)
Do you want some sandwich? (Do you want part of a sandwich?)
How about you, Gentle Reader?
What in the speaking or writing of English produces a blackboard moment for you?
Without a doubt, my biggest blackboard moment is when people use bring instead of take (and vice versa).
I have a friend who says “I’m too Bothered to do something” rather than “I can’t be bothered”
It drives me insane but she can’t see how incorrect it is
‘Youse’ as a plural of you.
Agree with most on here. Some that cause a physical reaction in me that I haven’t seen (so not necessarily according to severity of spasm:
SpeSSies instead of speSHies (species). So common, even among those who should know better that the proper SH sound is rarely heard. There is a rule here (at least in American): C’s before i or e-led vowel combinations are almost always pronounced as sh. That might sound complex, but it is not. E.g. no one would not say O-SUN (for ocean) no one says SPESS-EE-AL for special. You will hear, however, negoSeate and contraverSeal instead of negoSHeate or controverSHal (four syllables, not fi-ive) from overly-miseducated types who think that they are being somehow “refined”. Similarly, no one says soSEEal for social, but the supposedly edumacated will say soSEEology all day long.
Also, my nominee for most “Misspelled and Never-Corrected” word in English, is the noun “marshal”, as in field marshal, fire marshal, parade grand marshal, US Marshal, etc. The misspelling of a doubled L on the end is this common– out of 5 academic-press books on my shelf right now on the subject of law and law enforcement it is spelled wrong in 3. Likewise I regularly encounter military literature populated with Field Marshalls (not the German kind). This is not a US-UK thing. I have the program for commencement from a well-regarded university with the Grand Marshall of the ceremony grandly announced on Page Three (or threee). The surname Marshall is almost always spelled so. That, probably, is a source of the confusion. But it’s no excuse. We don’t see mens’ taylor shops very often.
would of, could of, should of (would have, could have, should have)
Really? You’re mad that people pronounce the t in Clinton? Lmao, that’s crazy.
Most of my pet peeves were mentioned already (“less/fewer”, “It/it’s/their/they’re”, “loose/lose” are all high up on my list) , but I can add one more: “principle” vs. “principal”. You wouldn’t believe how many professionals in the financial industry are unable to differentiate between these terms. Let me also add a general remark. English is not my mother tongue, I learned it in school and later augmented my originally rather poor grasp of it autodidactically (mainly by reading a lot). Since 2008 I run an English-language economics blog (Acting Man) , where I publish my own articles as well as articles written by guest authors. Many of my guest authors are from the US and I edit their articles before publishing them. Initially it was quite baffling to me how often I had occasion to correct grammatical and syntactic mistakes made by native speakers of English (mind, I’m certainly not immune against making such mistakes myself, but that doesn’t keep me from spotting those of others). In the meantime I have realized that this problem is by no means unique or confined the US. It may even be worse in other countries (depending on the grammatical complexity of the language). I can confirm that even well-educated German-speakers are often at war with their language and its grammatical and spelling rules, not to mention that much of what is written in that language is a stylistic catastrophe of frightening proportions. In short, when you see people mangle the English language, take heart. It’s a good bet languages all over the world are suffering similar abuse.