My biggest pet peeve is being incorrectly corrected. In the past month I’ve been told that:
A British pence is 1/18 of a pound, not 1/100
There are no rickshaws in Japan because they are native to India
Cleanly is not a real word
Of course, being the anal retentive, know-it-all that I am, I looked this stuff up later only to find out I was right all along. Thankfully I’m not too magnanimous to let my friends and family know about it.
I share your pain on a daily basis.
Ad copy keeps coming back with corrections written in the most god-awful Engrish, and while the good clients will accept a grammatical touch-up or some vocabulary alternatives, there are plenty who will insist that their own copy, warts and all, be put in exactly as they wrote it.
I’ve had my spelling of “sociology” corrected by several people who insist there’s an A in it. Social, socialogy. Putzes.
But without good old Engrishu and good ol’ Asian face we’d be bereft of the world’s best selling car (well, HK’s best seller, anyway, the Toyota Corolla.
This is kind of an example: When I was in high school I lived for a while in an apartment building, and someone told me that a certain neighbor, the mother of a guy I knew, was Spanish. I thought that was pretty cool, and the next time I went to see my friend, I started talking to his mom. “So what part of Spain are you from?” I asked. She gave me an annoyed look that clearly showed she was revising downward her previous estimation of my intelligence, then patiently explained to me that not everyone who spoke Spanish was from Spain, that she was from Chile where they also speak Spanish, that the prefered term was “Hispanic,” etc. Somehow it felt too complicated to explain the misunderstanding, so instead I stood there with my ears burning, nodding my head and acting like I was learning something I didn’t already know. :smack:
Pence is plural, so:
A British penny is 1/100th of a pound
or
A British pound is made up of 100 pence.
-‘A British pence’ is grammatically incorrect.
My grade one teacher mistakenly insisted that I was spelling my name incorrectly.
I anticipate outliving her.
I had a way-too-long argument with someone a few weeks ago about what sound ß makes in German. He insisted it was like a B and after too many minutes of arguing about it, he asked someone who takes German, who of course said he was wrong. I’d been fairly deferential to him, considering I knew I was right, just in case I was in a parallel universe where it did sound like a B. I hate being wrong.
(So then later that day I was in another little argument with someone else, except this time I was wrong and really assertive about it. And it was in front of about 20 people. Not doing that again.)
In fifth grade three or four of my friends were certain that since a bitch is a female dog, a bastard must be a male dog. I, raised on Les Miserables, knew differently, and I tried to convince them for most of recess. Our teacher finally confirmed I was right. (This was hippie school, which is why we weren’t in trouble for talking about bad words all recess.)
Just curious – did you try forestalling her rant by explaining that you’d been told she was Spanish, and so weren’t just make an assumption based on her native tongue?
My third-grade teacher told me that my nickname (Betsey) was not a diminutive form of my given name (Elizabeth) and that my parents should have been calling me Liz or Beth if they wanted to use a nickname. She refused to call me Betsey and would only call me Elizabeth. She also corrected it on all my papers, crossing out ‘Betsey’ and writing in ‘Elizabeth.’
She did the same thing to a classmate named Margaret who went by Meg. She insisted the nickname for Margaret was ‘Peggy’ and that ‘Meg’ was a nickname for Meghan.
Not surprisingly, I hated her. She’s dead now. 
I think Muffin wins the thread. :eek:
Whoa! Just, whoa!
My arse of a former stepfather once insisted that Notre Dame, as in the University of . . ., was spelled “Noter Dame.” His evidence: he was from Indiana, and by God, he knew how they spelled it in South Bend. I disagreed politely to a point, when, tired of his stupidity, I retreated to my bedroom and retrieved a recent Sports Illustrated with “Notre Dame” in two inch yellow letters on the cover. His response, “Well, they clearly misspelled it.” What a turd.
No, I think Bibliocat does…
:eek:
I still remember my grade 6 teacher telling me that there was no such ocean as the “Southern Ocean”, it was the Antarctic Ocean.
There was a similar thread like this recently. I brought up my pet peeve about people correcting my “incorrect” pronunciation of Linux. Of course someone came along in the thread to point out that my pronunciation was actually incorrect. Talk about missing the whole concept.
Oh heck yes. I get incorrectly corrected from time to time and sometimes, if it’s a friend or relative, I’m so embarrassed for the person that I don’t really insist on being right. I try to bring the matter up a few days later, privately, and say “Oh, you know what, that bothered me so much I looked it up here and the answer is, after all, what I’d thought when we talked,” or something like that.
But the worst cases of all are when the person correcting me incorrectly has power over me. Ugh.
I’ll never forget an incident that happened to me in middle school. It was a science test, multiple choice. We got our tests back and the teacher had marked only one of my answers wrong – an almost perfect score. I looked at the answer I’d given (I forget the actual question itself) and was surprised – I was sure I was right after all!
The teacher then proceeded to read out the answers aloud while we went over the tests. When she got to the one she’d marked wrong on my sheet, she said “the correct answer is a.”
I checked again. I’d written a as my answer and been marked wrong.
So, like any kid, I raised my hand. “Uh, I got that one right but you marked it wrong,” I said. She asked to see the paper, looked thoughtful, then delivered her verdict:
“The tail on your handwritten a is too high. It could be a d. I can’t be sure which it is.”
Now, never mind the logic of deciding that the child must be wrong if there’s any doubt. I had a much better argument, which I then used, without any squeamishness about embarrassing her in front of the class.
“Miss X, the possible answers to this question are a, b, and c. There is no d. Therefore I think it’s unlikely I was trying to write a d no matter how bad my handwriting is.”
As you can tell, I’m still a little mad about it.
I did get credit, though.
Sailboat
I got this from a gym teacher once. She wanted us to line up alphabetically and then insisted I was in the wrong place. When she finally did realize that I was right, she was really embarrassed because she knows my parents and had been one of my mother’s students at one point. 
I think I started to say something but somehow missed my chance, and found myself stuck in the pose of being a dumbass, after which it felt too late to backtrack. In retrospect I should have been able to laugh and explain what happened, but I had even less social pose back then than I do now. :wally
I still hold a grudge from fifth grade - and its colored a lot of how I do things…
We had a “group assignment” to research a country and do an oral presentation. The groups were created by the teacher - no picking your own friends. My group was a bunch of schmucks, so I did most - all - of the work and they pretty much stood behind me while I talked. Our country was Spain.
We got a B on the assignment - and the group hated me - because my idiot teacher insisted that there were no bullfights in Spain, bullfights are a Mexican thing. I’d obviously made up a huge part of my presentation.
Back then I was a meek 10 year old. I took my B, took the “you blew our grade” from my classmates, and never said or did a thing (other than check about the running of the bulls at Pamplona to make sure I didn’t dream the whole thing up).
Now I hate group projects and group work. And I’m a bitch on wheels when I’m incorrectly corrected.
I sometimes get told I pronounce my (first) name wrong. Always by people from Wales, who seem incapable of understanding that the only difference is that I say it with an English accent.