Usually I have no time or patience for education shibboleths but for some reason abuse of the reflexive pronoun makes me positively irate. I think I can handle the substitution of an ‘incorrect’ word for a correct one when the words are equal in length or it’s obviously a a feature of their home dialect but using the reflexive improperly seems to me to be an error where you have to actively work at being wrong.
You know what I consider annoying & pretentious? Use of terms like “reflexive pronoun “.:rolleyes:
One I’ve never got a handle on is “vase.” If you say “vayse,” it sounds like a cheap dime-store knock-off, but “vahz” sounds pretentious as all get-out.
Other than that, geez but you people are a bundle of nerves, looking over this thread. (Except for all of you who object to people referring to themselves in the third person. Third-person referrers really ought to be put to death.)
This one, particularly, is an interesting case. (And judging from the way you phrased this, I think you were hinting at this.)
“Apropos” does sound like it’s related to “appropriate”, so people use it as a highfalutin’ synonym.
It’s not. “Apropos” means “relevant to” or “concerning”. As in “Apropos of people who misuse ‘apropos’ to mean ‘appropriate’, this is clearly a pretention failure.”
The closest may be when “apropos” is used adjectivally, to describe the relevancy of one subject to another; “appropriate” has can have a similar meaning in the same context (“I thought his use of French in this conversation was apropos/appropriate”), although I’d argue that there is a connotational difference: “apropros” states that there is a relationship, whereas “appropriate” purports that the relationship is strongly supportable and “good”.
BTW, if you search my writings here, you’ll find lots of pretentious constructions. Sorry, bad habit, but frankly I’m not gonna spend that much time editing back the sesquipedalia here, since I’d rather just get the ideas out and move on.
Actually, I think this started with a good impulse: a reminder that the situation on the ground (in the field, at the line of battle, at the scene of the crisis) is the only situation that matters. Especially when the phrase is used in a headquarters hundreds or thousands of miles away and elements of the situation not on the ground (politics, bean-counting, press and PR, etc.) have a way of trying to make themselves look really important to REMFs that run operations from hundreds or thousands of miles away from the actual battlegrounds.
It doesn’t work, of course. For instance, to a general in a command center, the “big picture” matters a lot, even if detrimental to the “little picture” “on the ground”. But it’s a noble though.
As opposed to what?
LOL. I am graduating in a few weeks with my Master’s in Anthropology, and I have never heard any two professors pronounce paradigm the same.
words that annoy me when used on the SDMB
Vis-à-vis
apropos
quote, unquote
former and latter
Ergo
irregardless
Any chance English is not her first language? I ask this because some folks whose first language is, say, French or Spanish will often say “Of course!” when speaking English. They think they’re saying the equivalent of a word or phrase in their native language which means “Emphatically yes!” They are unaware that they’re actually saying “Yes – and you’re an idiot for not knowing that already!”.
We are not concerned.
(You didn’t say anything about Majestic Plural, did you? :p)
Yeah. Majestic Plural is almost the ultimate pretention, even when used as prescribed. I’m glad it fell out of common usage in that setting (royalty), and I’ll nutpunch anyone who tries using it other than as a specific joke as above.
I think I read somewhere that Queen Victoria didn’t actually do this. Or I might have been drunk. One or the other.
“Myself”, the actual word under discussion.
In English usage, it pretty much invariably rhymes with “measure” and “treasure”, and to say “LEEZyoure” would sound unbearably affected.
just came up with another one from the SDMB
shibboleth
It’s so often misused, when the user really means “slang” or “saying” or something similar.
Which is a reflexive pronoun. Still not getting what the problem is.
zombie or no
methinks you aren’t.
“Pretentious? Moi??”
Using the technical term “reflexive pronoun” which should only be used in the context of a English grammar discussion , instead of the actual word being discussed- is the hallmark of being annoying & pretentious.
I’m not sure what you mean by “English” (are you in England?), but I generally hear LEEZH-ur. I actually think LEZH-ure (rhymes with “treasure”) sounds kind of pretentious, or at least British.
I’m not sure if these exactly fits the subject of the thread, because I don’t think these are pretentious, but they irritate me.
There is one guy at work who says “per batim” when he means “verbatim”.
There is another guy who thinks the ‘t’ in “moot” is silent, and just pronounces it “moo”.
There are also several people here who say “flush out” when they mean “flesh out” (e.g. “flush out” an idea or design). Some of them are recreational hunters, so I’ll cut them some slack.
Is the moo guy Joey from “Friends?” 