Ah, I see what you’re saying, and I think you’re right: while “man” is sometimes used as an adjective (man cave, it’s a man thing, Manboobs), I can’t think of any cases in which it’s used as an adjective in front of a job. Even if you were appropriately discussing the sex of a worker, you’d use “male.” I’m not the only man teacher in third grade, I’m the only male teacher. Whereas someone might say that Dr. Jones is the only woman doctor in the trauma unit.
That’s an interesting one. I don’t think I’ve ever heard light-year to mean time, even though it seems to me to be a likely candidate for misuse. The closest I’ve heard was referring to something as “light years ahead of its time,” but I’ve heard constructions like “miles ahead of its time,” so it’s not necessary–to me–to have a temporal unit of measure there.
I have. It was in an old “Space Ghost” comic book. The [enemy, the likes of which I don’t recall] was sent into deep space, where it would remain for “thousands of light-years” or something like that. This was in the early 70s, and the comic book was several years old.
Yeah, I don’t think the “blonde” vs “blond” distinction is really followed rigorously in English…is it? I mean, I know that, technically, a “blond” should be a male, and a “blonde” should be female.
My AP Stylebook says “blond” for all adjectival uses, and the blond/blonde distinction for male/female nouns usages. It seems a bit odd to me to maintain the distinction in the noun form, but, well, as I said before, English doesn’t have to make sense.
This actually gets at one of my real pet peeves: the idea that if we pirate a word from another language, we steal its grammar as well. There’s no reason that “blond” should follow French gender rules, or that “octopus” should follow Greek pluralization rules, and so on. Once we’ve kidnapped the word fair and square, we get to dress it up in the local costume.
Yeah, a lot of those Greek and Latinate plurals bug me. Octopodes? Octopi? I vote “octopuses.” I’m fine with certain words like “media” and scientific/mathematical plurals like “radii” and “antennae,” but in other uses it’s quite jarring. I remember being at a business conference discussing the building of multiple “stadia” and it was just driving me crazy.
It’s a combination of spelling and grammar, but I get really irritated when people use the wrong form of the word there, their, or they’re and also the wrong form of your and you’re. I don’t know what it is but it’s super irritating to read. Society seems to not pay much attention to grammar anymore. I see people twice my age (I’m 23) who don’t seem to know which word to use. I just don’t understand it. What happens at their job? Or when they apply for a job? Huge pet peeve.
Here are two more things that annoy me. The first is pronouncing data with a short “a” sound. Every print dictionary I’ve ever read gives “daytuh” as either the first or only pronunciation of the word. “Datuh” just sounds juvenile to me.
The other is a car- the Kia Spectra. That’s plural! Why would anyone give a car a plural name? What if Ford and Chevy did that? “Hey Joe, what are you driving these days?” “Well, I have a Mustangs, but I’d rather have a Corvettes!”
Wow, you are now my favorite English user of all time. In addition to using a word that I’ve never seen before (lexemes) you created the brilliant phrase “seen by the observable fact” which is brilliant beyond anything I could hope to conceive of.