A friend of mine gets his panties in a twist every time someone says that they’re nauseous. He says “No, you’re nauseated. If you were nauseous you’d be causing nausea”.
Dictionaries agree that nauseous can also mean “affected by nausea” but my friend doesn’t care.
I want to bitch slap people that leave out the words to be. “The lawn needs mowed and your house needs painted”. Gah!
You got the name of the play wrong, too. It’s Waiting for Godot.
Mine:
literally = ! figuratively. God, this makes me cringe.
The Muslim holy book is the Qur’an. If you can’t figure out where the apostrophe goes, just spell it Koran, okay? This drives me crazy, and I see it wrong in books, magazines, and message board posts all the freaking time. The apostrophe represents a glottal stop and is an actual letter in Arabic. You can’t put it anywhere you like!
The one that gets to me is “I’m going to try **and **do X.” No you’re going to try to do X. Perhaps it is said in an effort to be optimistic. I’m not sure. This is one I hear on TV news, read in papers etc.
Unfortunately, the trend has been around longer than that–I saw “loose” used for “lose” at an REI in Minnesota around 1993, I believe.
That was intentional, and was supposed to emphasize the difference between “waiting for” and “waiting on”.
This one will probably send me on a killing spree someday. The next person who tells me they literally jumped through the roof will find themselves literally thrown through the roof.
Quoth OtakuLoki
Right there is one that annoys me. You can argue that the ISS and the things in it are in .8 gravities, that being the strength of the Earth’s gravity at that height. I’m fine with that. Or you can take the relativistic view that the station, being in freefall, is in zero gravity. But there’s no meaningful sense in which the station is in a little bit of gravity. “Microgravity” comes from people who have the impression that “zero gravity” is wrong (it isn’t, relativistically speaking), but don’t know why, so they coin a term meaning “almost but not quite zero gravity”.
The common term “zero gravity” perhaps does not fully represent the subtleties of the situation, but it’s far more correct than “microgravity”. And “freefall” does fully represent the subtleties of the situation, though I understand entirely why that one won’t catch on in the public mind (and am not bothered by that). Use either one of those, just not “microgravity”.
And don’t get me started on “escape velocity” instead of “escape speed”.
Maybe the writers of the phrase thought “you have a friend in Pennsylvania” could be taken as you have a friend who lives in Pa. and you’ve got etc. as Pa. itself is your friend.
Yes, you have stated my point here exactly. It has become an idiom. It is a single unit that means, “I do not care about that.” It is my contention that unless people know that the literal meaning of what they are saying is, “It is possible for me to care less about that thing than I currently do, thereby insinuating that I care about it somewhat,” and with that knowledge intend for it to be understood to mean the opposite, then they are not being sarcastic. They are just using an idiom without thinking about it. This idea is supported by my experience that not one person I have ever spoken to about this used the phrase in a sarcastic manner. They have either never thought about it (the vast majority) or realized it did not make any sense but continued to use it out of habit.
By your tone it seems you think I was making fun of you. OK, I guess I was a bit. It was not mean spirited though. There was just a certain beauty in following the phrase, “…the most misused grammatical term in existence,” with a common word substitution error. When discussing grammar we open ourselves up to nitpicking, as I am sure I will be regretting once I notice the grammatical errors in his post that are escaping me at the moment.
Which should, of course, be THIS post. Damn, in the actual sentence I predicted it.
A follow-up: The uninformed grammar Nazis who correct me when I use effect as a verb. (Note: I’m not talking about Nava here, s/he just reminded me.) I can effect changes, dadgummit!
And more generally, when the would be grammarians “correct” me for any legitimate usage. If you’re going to be annoying, be in the right
And I’m sure that I made some grammatical mistakes in this post. But I’m fine with that.
Even with the many, many grammar rants I’ve read here, I’ve never seen anyone decry the misuse of the phrase “how dare”. As in
How dare him! or How dare her!.
Just because the pronoun comes after the verb doesn’t make it automatically an object. Yes I know it’s an archaic idiom, because modern English uses the auxiliary in forming a question, and I know that English is a subject-verb-object language, and I further know that I’m being prescriptivist.
But the usages above just sound semi-literate to me.
I’ve never once in my life heard that. It sounds absolutely bizarre to me.
Okay, so I see that the AHD has decided to accept “orgasm” as a verb. The whores. Fortunately, Webster’s Online doesn’t go down that road.
Unless I’m greatly mistaken, orgasm was always a noun until Shere Hite, in “The Hite Report,” decided to use it as a verb. I’m an old fashioned boy, and it drives me nuts. But go ahead and verb things if it makes you happy.
Sorry for not getting back to this earlier. I haven’t read the entire thread yet, so I don’t know if anyone else has addressed this.
Anyhow, from dictionary.com:
My whole life I’ve been taught that the adjective form is “proper.” However, after reading the dictionary.com usage note, I see that i’m the idjit here. 
Has anyone mentioned using apostrophes for plurals?
Folks that write “If you think (X), you’ve got another thing coming,” instead of the correct version, “another think coming”.
I know it’s been debated on here endlessly, I know that those idiomatic vandals Judas Priest have muddied the waters with their misspelling, but it’s wrong wrong wrong! It makes no sense, and it destroys the whole point of the phrase. You might think X, but you will very shortly have the error of your views thrust upon you and will instead think Y.
And I’ve got a whole bunch of reputable, pre-Judas Priest cites, so if you think I’m gonna back down on this one, you’ve got…
I never, ever, ever in my life heard " … another think coming" till I read one of the endless debates here on this board. I know in one of them, one poster presented pretty sound reasoning why ‘thing’ was just as correct as ‘think.’
It’s always been and always will be “… another thing coming” for me.
I’m 41, BTW. Mid-Atlantic US.
“Another think coming” just sounds soooo wrong to me.
Schizophrenia is NOT multiple personality disorder, and aren’t even remotely related. One is a neurosis, and one is a psychosis.
Reflexes and instincts are two distinct things. Cringing from a loud noise is reflexive, not instinctive.
I give up on the grammar battles. I realize that meanings change, but I still hold that scientific defintions are static, and that common usage doesn’t change it until the field of science changes it.
“Verbing weirds language.” - Bill Watterson
My personal Betty Noir is criterion vs. criteria. But I understand the inarguability of idiomatic usages, and I let it pass uncommented upon.
I’ve seen this sign over a coal-burning fireplace:
If the BMT put :
If the B . putting :
Don’t put : over a -der.
You’d be an * it.
If the grate be empty, put coal on.
If the grate be full stop putting coal on.
Don’t put coal on over a high fender.
You’d be an ass to risk it.
Sure it makes sense. I always interpreted “you’ve got another thing coming” as meaning that a thing different from the expected thing is coming soon. “Another think coming” sounds more like a pun on the original usage to me, and I’ve never heard or seen it like that before. I’m ready to be won over, though: Show me your cites.
D’oh. That’ll teach me to be a smartass.
Well, no it won’t. But maybe I’ll read the entire post first before correcting it next time.
It’s supposed to be humorously non-grammatical, same as “sure as eggs is eggs”. It’s a reduplication - if that’s what you think, you’ve got another think coming. Otherwise, what is the first thing? There is no thing, so the thing that’s coming won’t be another thing, it’ll just be… a thing. If that’s what you think, you’ve got a thing coming. Well, yeah, okay, but it’s hardly a snappy phrase.
As for cites… newest first:
Here on my desk is a big copy of Collins English Dictionary (pub 2003).
From *The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1996) *:
The alt.usage.english FAQ (http://www.alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxyouhav.html) :
And here are those cites from the OED:
And in the realms of personal anecdote, my grandmother (b. 1919) used the phrase, and told me that she learnt it from her mother as a child in the 1930s. I wonder where her mother first picked it up from?
It’s been around for a long long time, and people have obviously misheard it or missed the point of the phrase and so bastardised it into “another thing coming”.
