Huh?
Isn’t a “New York minute” also a short time?
In the past five years or so I’ve noticed a trend towards saying “thank you” twice in a row, I.e.;
“Here’s your food.”
“Thank you thank you!”
I don’t know why, but it rubs me the wrong way and I find it annoying.
The acceptance of double negatives drives me nuts. Hearing some sports figure being interviewed after a game proclaiming “They couldn’t do nothing to our defense” and the interviewer just going along with it makes me grit my teeth.
I’ve had these very thoughts, even after learning about prescriptive / descriptive here on this very board. I’ve mostly internalized the concept of language changing, though I imagine some things will always irk me. Of course, I fully punctuate texts so what do I know?
And to answer the OP, in addition to all the ones already mentioned, when did people start saying “also too . . .”. Also, using “myself” instead of me/I is not making you appear smarter.
Getting married is a unique experience.
Walking on the moon is a unique experience.
Walking on the moon is more unique than getting married.
My peeve is “Sea Shanty.” It should be “sea chanty” but folk etymology has the last say and it’s become standard despite me.
That is either a speech to text error or an autocorrect error but either way it’s a real winner. Made my day.
Either that or I’ve been whooshed and it was a very subtle dig at how English spelling of unusual words is becoming more phonetic as so few people read any more.
Used to be bookworms had huge sections of their vocabularies they didn’t know how to pronounce, never having heard the term. Now many of us are in the Bizarro opposite world of having hefty swathes of vocabulary we’ve only heard, and never seen written.
I have the same antipathy towards “hone in” (like sharpening a knife) instead of “home in” (like a homing pigeon or a homing missile). But there’s not logic to my annoyance; I understand the meaning perfectly either way.
That’s exactly the kind of thing that bugs me. We can pretend it works, the alternate metaphor isn’t terrible, but the original idiom was more apt.
You know, I’ve never really understood that.
Let’s say you show me something unique. Maybe you’ve created a magic wand that turns people into frogs? Whatever it is, I’m wowed, because I’ve never seen anything like it — because, as far as I know, nothing else of that sort exists. They aren’t mass-produced. I didn’t buy four of them last week. And so on.
And then you show me, oh, twenty Chicken McNuggets, and you ask if I can say what makes McNugget #5 different from McNugget #6 and McNugget #7 and, indeed, all of the other ones you’ve placed in front of me. “Uh, no,” I reply, “I think it’s pretty much indistinguishable from the others. It, like #6, appears to merely be one of a kind.”
I know that’s the wrong way to put it, but I always raise an eyebrow.
I’ve never heard anyone use “one of a kind” as anything but “the only one of its kind”. I would never assume “merely one of a kind”. If I heard it I wouldn’t be confused about the meaning, but certainly I’d find it idiosyncratic.
But that’s what interests me: if you asked me whether something was the only one of its kind, and I wanted to reply that, no, I have another one of the same kind right here, then — what?
then… you have 2 things of the same kind? I’m not sure what’s supposed to be the interesting point here. Colloqually “one of a kind” usually means “the only one of its kind, as far as I know”. If you happen to learn there’s another one of that kind, that doesn’t invalidate the expression, just your assumption. Now it’s 2 of a kind.
"How come. . . "
If you wanna know “why,” just ask “why.”
“Aren’t I. . .”
Ugh!
As others have asked, which mavens are those? Because this is unequivocally, egregiously wrong and should never be acceptable. While the referent of the initial phrase may be clear in this particular context, it may not be clear in others. For example, in “As someone who helped to significantly raise our revenues over the past year, our CEO wants to invite you …” is the CEO praising you, or is he praising himself? The rules for how we use referents are so basic and important that if we ignore them, we may as well throw all of English grammar out the window.
I’m with @Yllaria on this. There is an unexpressed connecting phrase that basically says “here is some information that may interest you”. Leaving the phrase unspoken doesn’t doesn’t promote ambiguity or lack of precision, so I’m fine with it.
Quattro!
It might be worth pointing out that competent writers have been using “literally” as an intensifier for years, but when they do, they’re using it to intensify an appropriate metaphor, like “she was so happy she literally glowed”. The is the same descriptive styling as “radiant happiness” or “radiant beauty”, where it’s understood that the person is not literally emitting radiation.
What I think happened over the years is that less capable writers and speakers who didn’t understand metaphors starting parroting this construction, turning the word into an all-purpose intensifier which it never was and never should be.
Some linguists (Steven Pinker comes to mind) point out that double negatives are quite common in some languages, French being one example. For instance, the sentence “Je ne sais rien” if translated word by word comes out as “I don’t know nothing” but actually means “I don’t know anything”. Or take the title of the Edith Piaf song “Non, je ne regrette rien”, literally “No, I don’t regret nothing” but meaning “I have no regrets”.
My response to such foolishness is that English is not French.
That each of them is one of the same kind. Or, if you will, that each of them is one of a kind, because neither is the only one of that kind.
Yes, I understand and use the colloquial meaning. But, when doing so, it always strikes me as weird.
You think we should say “Amn’t I”? Or must we avoid a contraction for this, and say “Am I not”?
(I never noticed until now that we use “are” for this…no, it isn’t logically consistent with the paradigm, but it IS correct and ubiquitous. I assume it arose centuries ago, to avoid the “mnt” consonant cluster.)
I thought every minute was a short time.
There’s an NPR podcast called “It’s Been a Minute,” which in context clearly means “It’s Been Quite a While.” I don’t listen to it, but I started hearing ads for it at a few years ago. That’s where I first encountered this usage.
Since then, I’ve noticed more people–mostly, but not entirely, younger people–using “minute” to mean “a long time.”