I’d like to effect change in your opinion.
If you change her opinion, it might change her affect as well.
So what effect are you trying to affect?
“Nucular” is wrong because an atom does not have a nuculus.
“Supposably” will probably cause my eventual indictment for murder, unless “prolly” beats it to the punch.
There is no such word as “alot.” Thank you, M.E.!
Spelling-wise, “tounge,” and “loose/looser” instead of “lose/loser” are topping my personal hit parade.
To, two, too. They’re, there, their. So few and tiny words to produce such a great effect and veins popping out on my forehead.
Fewer/less grates on my nerves as well, this explains why I have a soft spot for Albertsons, which has yet to cave in to the knuckle scraper contingent.
It speaks well of my level of relaxation that this is all I can come up with at the moment. I know there are myriad more, but right now I am not attuned to annoyance.
Oh, and my own incorrect use of ellipses is less an affront than a charming affectation, okay? 
Language usage fights that I have conceded as lost, but continue to resist:
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The use of “begs the question” for “raises the question” (“begs the question” used to mean “is a leading question” or “contains the expected answer in its phrasing”, as in “when did you stop beating your wife”)
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The use of “waiting on” in place of “waiting for”, as in an event or person (used to be “waiting on” someone could only mean you were taking their order at a restaurant) (can you imagine a current translation of Satre’s Waiting On Godot? shudder)
Just the other night I heard a newscaster warn me that identity theives might steal the PIN number from my ATM machine.
My head asploded.
Eve, maybe he works for The Department Of Redundancy Department.
…Sector Twelve! 
I actually saw this one in an account memo: “Customer was saposto get a free phone.”
I died a little inside…
Precisely. Just as “muscular” is wrong because you don’t have muscules.
You not only misspelled Sartre, you denied Samuel Beckett proper credit for writing the play in question.
To return to the topic of the OP: Several of my pet peeves have already been mentioned. I’ll add definately (why do people who have no trouble spelling infinitely not see its definite similarity to that other adverb?) and myself (as in “Amy and myself will be attending your party”).
“Irregardless” makes me want to go on a killing spree, as do all mondegreens (“beckon call”, etc.) “Flammable” doesn’t really bother me, though; it’s a simplification and not at all redundant. The way I see it is that this is how languages develop over the centuries.
“Irregardless” kills me, though, because it makes the word more complicated than it has to be and doesn’t make linguistic sense: “ir” and “less” would logically cancel each other out, but that’s not the way the “word” works. That’s not natural development of the language, that’s raping it. Lose/loose really burns me, too.
Augh! All three of these eat me alive. One student in my second-semester Spanish class–who was in my first-semester Spanish class last semester and would’ve learned something if she hadn’t spent the whole class period whispering ridiculous jokes on the middle-school emotional level to her only friend. During our coverage of the preterite, she was off in Jokeville and paid just enough attention for some of the irregular verb forms to enter an ear and get lodged somewhere in her brain, but not enough to figure out what they meant. When she’s called on to say something in Spanish she seems to take hours, with long, contemplative pauses between each word: “Ayer…uhhhhhh…yo…hizo*…uhhh…el* clase…uhhhh…ma…tay…ma…tee…cause?” She also gave us this gem last semester: “Es la mochila Juana’s*”.
I don’t know about you, but here in Southern California we (a) don’t use the word queue for anything, ever and (b) would assume that que refers to the Spanish word. I haven’t seen this new spelling, but I imagine I would scoop my eyes out if I saw it on a regular basis as you say.
So what’s the deal with double negatives?
In the Air Force I talked to a lot of Southerners, many of whom used “y’all” as a singular pronoun and “all y’all” as its plural as well as the possessive “y’all’s”. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this gem, from a Georgia boy to a Texan with me in the middle:
Georgia Boy: “Did you hear her? She says youse instead of y’all!”
Me: :eek:
Georgia Boy: “Or, uh, ‘you guys’. I guess.”
I never heard it when I lived in the Beltway.
“Muscular” is right because it’s actually a word, which exists. Forget all the nucleus crap–the word “nuclear” legitimately exists and the word “nucular” doesn’t. The latter is grating and requires a higher expenditure of energy, which accomplishes nothing except to make you look like an idiot.
*Aarrrrggghh! Must…resist…
Fine, but that sort of contradicts your earlier claims to be operating on logic. Since you have no argument or reason to support your point, you’re asserting something that boils down to a superstition. It’s fine if you believe in this superstition - but it sort of ruins your attempt to sound like you’re discussing this from any logical standpoint, and it certainly destroys any linguistic legitimacy in what you say.
I have a feeling this one is really lost, but I’m still trying. Our newspaper makes me want to tear my hair out.
Conjugate the verb “to lead”
Today I lead
Yesterday I led
I have led
I blame this on spell check. At least partly, anyway.
Hah! At which point I want to throttle them, or throw up my papers and leave the classroom in a huff, because NO ONE is paying any attention to a word I say. (Another fave: Student: “I wasn’t here yesterday. Did we do anything important?” Me: “No. We never do anything of any importance in this class.” )
I had a particularly curmudgeonly prof for a Spanish conversation class in undergraduate. One of my fellow students had impeccable grammar skills but could not speak to save her life (and had the most stereotypical grating gringo accent imaginable). He used to say to her (in thickly accented English): “Ju know, if ju eva go to an Espanish speaking country, it will take ju a week just to get out of the airport.”
(Oh, and since I’m hijacking already…)
I give my students a list of abbreviations that I use to correct their compositions (eg, ADJ means use/make an adjective here). I actually added “GAH!!!” this semester for things like “Juana’s mochila” or “yo realizo” (for darse cuenta de, of course)!
(We’ll have to start another “Dumb things said by students” thread.)
A doper discovered it was a quote from a piece that said something to the effect of “I know not and care less.” He speculated that it was playing on the fact that not sounded like nought. Sadly the doper never filled us in on where he saw it.
I’m still fighting the battle over mass vs. weigh. Granted one may weigh something to determine it’s mass. One still cannot say that something weighs in kilograms. Nor is it usual to speak about mass in pounds, unless one is specifying lbm, and even there slugs are the more proper English unit.
Dammit.
This is particularly annoying when people talk about things in microgravity environments. Or variable gravity situations. I seem to recall hearing a Sci-Tech reporter on the local news talking about how much the ISS weighed. And I wanted to reach through the TV screen to smack him with a cluebat.
Pronouncing species “spee-sees” and Jesuit “Jeh-zoo-it.”
Can’t help you there. I don’t know nothing about them.
I wanted to slap my boss for apparently believing that the word “specific” begins with a silent S. :smack: Or else not knowing what the fucking word actually was.
“Identity thieves might steal the Personal Identity Number number from your Automatic Teller Machine machine.”
Jeez, it’s like listening to Lou Gehrig.
Are you sure they weren’t using “y’all” to address a single person who was representative of an organization or group of people? If not, I don’t have any reason to doubt what you heard. I’ll just say it’s very unusual. If I called a single person “y’all” I’d be looked at like I had two heads, or was a Yankee trying to sound southern.