For malapropisms, there’s “you’ve got another thing coming”. No, it should be “you’ve got another think coming”, as in “If you think that ____, you’ve got another think coming.”
And then there’s duct tape.
The expression, “that’s the thing, though” clearly proves that intangibles can be things and therefore “You’ve got another thing coming,” is just as correct as “You’ve got another think coming,” as a think would be a thing.
I know I’m like the Freakin Worker’s Vanguard Descriptivist Party and all, but I agree with this one. “Enormity” is a lovely word, and no other word has the same meaning; “monstrous” is about as close as we can get. It makes me sad if we lose this word’s meaning.
On the other hand, there’s no common word to talk about the massive size of something. “Immensity” is the closest I can think of. Maybe we just need to get that word into common parlance.
Sherbert! Sherbert! Sherbert!
I really reach you, man! (Wait, wrong word, wrong forum…)
If you are buying me sherbet and caramel you may call them whatever you like and still earn my love and affection. But if you say “sherbert” there is nothing I can do to prevent myself from desiring, at least a little, to hit you with a shovel. As C. S. Lewis said, “Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.” With a shovel, I’m sure he meant to write. 
As long as you don’t actually hit me with a shovel, I think we’ll be ok. I suspect you’d be apoplectic within minutes, though as I don’t know anyone IRL who says ʃərbət.
Sure, but there’s gotta be someone who does, althoughI’ve never heard it pronounced without the second “r,” either.
Affect and Effect
Lazy buggers use one or the other for everything and don’t care about the difference. “It was an affective message.”
Impact versus Affect or Effect
Business-ese: “You had an impactful message in today’s meeting.” Really? Did the message hit with the impact of a baseball hitting the catcher’s mitt?
Metaphorically, yeah. My problem with “impact” as a verb isn’t that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s that it’s used lazily, used to juice up drab and lifeless presentations, like dousing overcooked noodles in pesto.
Agreed. The only person who should say “sherbert” is Ernie.
And then there’s “begs the question.” It had a very different meaning back in Philosophy 101. And there’s no sense in which we need an equivalent of “raises the question.” At first it was defended as stronger than “raises the question.” I begrudging accepted that, but it was very short-lived. Now the two terms are synonymous, and the damage is done.
This could be addressed in one of those threads about rhotic-speakers. In much of England, for instance, the ‘r’ sound is like a semi-vowel, where you hear it much less than in the US. “Park”, to a rhotic American, would sound like “pahk”, for example. Hence, the diphthong-rhotic-speakers (e.g., New England) are saying “sherbert”, but the ‘r’ becomes part of the vowel sound (in fact, I am not sure but it might sound like “shehbeht” to a rhotic-speaker), which may have influenced broader American speech patterns. “Sherbert” would sound over-rhoticized to me, but I would need additional motivation for violent enormity.
The usage (not actually grammar) that annoys me is “flout”, as in “the brazen speeder flaunted the law”.
Hear, hear!
They do not mean the same thing. They mean entirely different things. They’re being used to mean the same thing, but that usage is incorrect, not because it’s being used sarcastically, but because it isn’t understood by the user.
This. A thousand times, this.
Absolute nonsense. I could care less is not an idiom in the sense that all of a sudden is an idiom. There is no grammatical reason for saying all of a sudden — it’s actually grammatically meaningless. It just happens to be all of a sudden because that’s the idiom.
I could care less is not the idiom. It is a misunderstanding of the idiom; a mistake. Just because a lot of people use it, doesn’t mean it’s correct. Google finds 72,300,000 uses of more then, which is eight times the number of uses of could care less, at only 9,130,000, and there’s no way in hell you’d say, “That’s language; when people start using more then that way, it means what people mean it to mean!” No, it doesn’t.
This, after chastising those who are dismayed over couldn’t care less being obliterated by complete nonsense.
As for my personal pet grammar peeves:
[ul]
[li]More/Bigger/Better/Etc. then[/li][li]It’s/Its[/li][li]Bonafide[/li][li]People that (it’s people who)[/li][/ul]
Speaking as someone who grew up on the Carmel ridge line, it’s Car-MELL.
Like it or not, it is now an idiom in American English. I personally prefer it to the literal “I couldn’t care less.” Nobody knows exactly why it developed that way. Some, like you, say it was mishearing or laziness. Others say it originated as deliberate irony or sarcasm. A related thought is that the form parallels certain Yiddish constructions. The reason really doesn’t matter. You can scream all you want about how much you hate it, how much it doesn’t make sense, but it is an idiom in AE and it’s not going away.
And here’s another interesting deconstruction of “could care less”, with analogies to forms like “I could give a flying fuck.”
But here’s another part that sticks out for me:
So, yeah, it’s here to stay and is a solidly entrenched American idiom.
I was referring to the pronunciation of “caramel.” The three-syllable example has the accent on the second syllable instead of the first.
I’m going to have to be less subtle in the future, I see.
It always happens when someone starts one of these “grammar pet peeve” threads that half of the stuff isn’t really about grammar anyway, but other things like spelling, punctuation, or word choice.
It also always happens that the same old list of language points gets trotted out over and over again, which usually includes this one:
[QUOTE=bigbwana]
“Bring him to the doctor”. I always thought that you brought something to yourself and took (take) some thing to another place.
[/quote]
However, deixis isn’t always used for strictly spatial reference. It also has affective uses. For example, you can be watching TV, and comment on a celebrity by choosing to say:
I hate that guy.
or
I love this guy.
and in neither case is the choice of this or that meant to reference physical distance. Instead, it indexes sentiment (negative or positive).
In the same way, we might say:
Did you know that Aunt Sophie is in the hospital? Let’s bring her some flowers to cheer her up.
We choose bring (rather than take) in order to psychologically position ourselves in Aunt Sopie’s place–it’s a way of empathizing with her. There’s nothing “wrong” with that; in fact, it reflects one of those higher-level cognitive engagements that take place with language (and demonstrate why it’s so hard to get computers to use language the way humans do).
If you really want to understand the full spectrum of what people do with language, you can’t just fall back on the old one-dimensional dictums, just because they’re simple and easy to explain. It doesn’t do justice to the complexity of language.