A grammar pet peeve: Hanged vs. Hung

[NoCoolUserName]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

My pet peeve is people who don’t understand that language is idiomatic, not generated by logic gates. “I couldn’t care less,” “better than ever,” “literally” meant as “really,” and so on are totally fine usages, if you’re a human being and not an android.

Androids have a grammer checker? Do they have spellcheck as well?

[CC]

While many of these errors or unfortunate figures of speech or pet peeves or whatever are clearly grating on the sensibilities, the most egregious examples are those that are written or spoken by those who should be in the know. If my neighbor says “between you and I,” I cringe a bit, but when I hear it from a professional writer, a journalist, or an English teacher, it really kills. And the worst of the worst is a written character who’s one of those professionals. The writer of the piece - story, novel, tv show, film - is ostensibly a professional writer, ultra-aware of the language. And then, they produce a character, say, the English teacher on Parenthood, who mangles the object/subject pronouns, and you have a double whammy. Makes me grind my teeth down!

[Leo_Bloom]

“Fewer” confused with “less.” “Ten items or less” sign at supermarket. Bugs me every time.

@standingwave

The word “it’s” is the contraction for “it is” and not to be confused with “its”, which forms the possessive noun. It’s a wise dog that scratches its own fleas.

I can forgive it on message boards and even the occasional email but I’m beginning to see this slipping into once respected publications and it’s driving me nuts.

I am sure I know why “it’s” for “its” is now rampant: “it’s” is the default change by autocorrect whenever it sees “its” in every damn Apple product. I get tired of having to tell it no when I really do want “its.”

@Thudlow_Boink

“Lay” and “laid” aren’t past tenses of the same verb. “Lay” is the past tense of “lie” (the intransitive verb meaning to rest, recline, or remain), while “laid” is the past tense of “lay” (the transitive verb meaning “to set or place (something).” To add to the confusion, many people use the latter verb when the former is grammatically appropriate (as in “I’m going to lay [sic] down for a while”).

“Lay” and “lied” are both past tenses of “to lie,” but I think those "lie"s count as different words.

I used to care but it’s time to give up.

@InternetLegend

The “effect/affect” thing gets to me, as does the rampant confusion between “discreet” and “discrete”.

I have to pause constantly to check when I use “effect,” both in writing and in speech. “Affect” is in fact a noun in psychology (“a dull affect”). And I don’t know if the problem is a problem in German (capitalizing nouns has its virtues), but Affect, as I learned it, is a common noun in aesthetics of Classical music, and is usually taken over into English writing with italics held high.

Now that I’ve written that, I remember that a peeve of mine is when “classic” and “Classical” are used interchangeably. That’s simply incorrect.

@shijinn

argh, “I could care less” needs to die in a fire. it does not reflect well on the language to have both the positive and negative of the same construction of a phrase to mean the same thing!

In the current “false friends … including Brit/US” thread (sorry for no link, but I’d lose this post), that expression is also being hashed over. Apparently Brit and US meanings are opposite.

“I could give a damn but I couldn’t give a damn” may follow te same pattern. Will you ask there or should I?

You’re really going to flip when you learn about contranyms. My favorite is with. Britain fought with Germany in World War II and Britain fought with America in World War II mean totally different things.

I have read (but never been corrected, thank God) about the difference between “compared with” and “compared to,” and I always pause depending on context–one is valueless, the other implies one is “more than” whatever of the two.

Since nobody else seems to give a shit, that counts as an autopeeve.

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

You must think you’re pretty hot, huh? Or maybe you’re cool.

Or, to address it more directly, do you think you’re accurately understanding why the idiom works? Yeahhhh…SURE you are. No, you’re not.

When there’s a positive and negative of the same construction of a phrase to mean the same thing, there’s a pretty good chance that one of the constructions is sarcastic.

Not always:
This post from Left Hand is the shit.
He probably listens to some ill music.
The way he shredded that part was sick.
And that’s bad. (I think this is out of date now.)

[pulykamell]

@Leo_Bloom

“Fewer” confused with “less.” “Ten items or less” sign at supermarket. Bugs me every time.

The weird thing is I get irrationally bugged when I see “ten items or fewer” on a sign. I think the only stores I’ve seen that at are Whole Foods and/or Treasure Island (can’t remember which, or if both.) I know “fewer” is preferred, but it just sounds jarring to me.

[Obnoxious_Hood_Ornament]

I find myself affected by redundancies such as “refer back,” to the point where it feels like fingernails savaging the great chalkboard that is my mind.

[Inner_Stickler]

Well, speaking for no one but myself, refer means to consult something while refer back means to consult a document previously under discussion. And I’m probably being slightly snarky about it.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Leo_Bloom

Not always:
This post from Left Hand is the shit.
He probably listens to some ill music.
The way he shredded that part was sick.
And that’s bad. (I think this is out of date now.)

“Sarcastic” is probably the wrong word here, inasmuch as “sarcastic” denotes aninsult. “Ironic” is closer, but closer still is the idea of oppositional slang. I’m having trouble coming up with a good cite for it; maybe others can help. There’s a whole category of slang in which a bit of humor is (initially) derived by saying the exact opposite of what you mean.

A non-slang example of this: awhile ago I posted a picture on FB of my toddler in the woods sitting on a stone bench contemplating a bolete, and a friend posted, “That’s not cute picture. Nope, not one bit.” He was complimenting the picture by saying what was obviously the opposite of what he thought.

In the same way, words like bad, wicked, sick, ill come to be used to mean the exact opposite.

I think that dynamic is a bit different from “I could care less,” which is used ironically (not sarcastically), but you’re right that it derives from a similar place, in which someone says something with a literal meaning the exact opposite of what they mean, and the audience immediately understand the idiomatic meaning.