These always peeve me:
an open mic, instead of an open mike
in synch, instead of in sync
Yes, yes, I know there are perfectly cromulent reasons for the former usages, there are rational reasons for them, but dammit! I don’t care! That’s not how I used to see them, and I just don’t like them!
Now, get off my lawn…
I would force everyone who uses the word “so” to start a sentence to three years of working retail at Christmas. Cut it out!!!
Even Seamus Heaney?
Croaking
Oh, wait. That’s not irrational at all. I hate that shit!
Prescriptivists. Oh, wait, that’s not irrational, either!
Maybe not so irrational, except in the extent to which I feel all grammar nazi judgey at the written usual suspects: “for all intensive purposes”; “could of”; incorrect usages of “your / you’re”, “there / their / they’re” and “its / it’s”.
Autocorrect when texting on my phone often replaces the correct “its / it’s” with the incorrect one, which enrages me, especially when I send without catching it (so if you ever see a grammar mistake in one of my posts, it’s clearly the fault of autocorrect 
)
My kid makes fun of me for typing a text, then reviewing and editing it (taking more time than the original typing).
Back in the day, a microphone was a mike, a disk was a disk. Seems like mic and disc were late 20th century “cutsy-isms”.
But which should I use? Is there a style manual somewhere? I want some objective truth, dammit!
Or damn it…
Would it also peeve you if I pointed out that “mic” is pretty much universally how microphone inputs are labeled on amplifiers and recording devices, because of course it’s short for “microphone”? “Mike” is short for “Michael”. 
By the power vested in me to decree things, I decree that both are OK.
Yes, absolutely this. The irrational part is the intensity of my annoyance at these careless mistakes, causing me to immediately regard the writer as an imbecile of the first order. It’s sometimes claimed that using “it’s” as a possessive is at least somewhat forgivable on the grounds that we’re accustomed to using the apostrophe to create possessive nouns. Hogwash and balderdash, I say! If you’re going to write in English, learn the damn language. Using “it’s” as a possessive determiner isn’t English. It’s not that hard to learn and remember the two variants and their proper use.
See my previous comment about “mic” and “mike”. My theory is that the written “mike” just came from an ill-advised phonetic spelling of the spoken short form, resulting in a written short form that’s a meaningless abomination.
The usage of “disk” and “disc” is often context-dependent. “Disk” is the generic term for a circular flat object, while “disc” has frequently been used for special cases like optical discs (CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray discs) and also sometimes for records (“vinyl disc”). Tragically, we also see that usage in “disc brakes” far too often, which I dislike, but what can you do; in the words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, it’s always something; if it’s not one thing, it’s another.
A few writers have used that variant for computer storage devices (most commonly “floppy disc”) but that never really caught on. It’s almost always been “disk”, from back in the days when computers had large “disk drives” to later “hard disks”. Unless of course you were IBM, which loved to create their own precious language; they didn’t have either disks or discs, they had DASDs (Direct Access Storage Device), which allowed them to charge 400% more than anyone would ever pay for a mere “disk”. 
I’ve mentioned this one before. “Try and” do something. No, it’s “try to” do something.
“They tried and failed?” —“They tried and died.”
Yeh, well, then what about “trike” as short for “tricycle”? Or “bike” for “bicycle”? If you wrote “tric” or “bic” would anyone understand what you meant?
So there, smart person!
I rarely get upset by language uses. Languages evolve. But when people use “literally” for “figuratively”, it can be a yellow flag for melodramatic.
Not the same. “And” in those cases is a valid conjunction that connects two disparate expressions, where the second verb in these examples describes a consequent outcome. You could substitute “and they” for “and” in the above, repeating the subject, and the sentence still makes sense: “They tried and they failed”.
Whereas in expressions like “try and do this” or “try and accomplish this” the conjunction isn’t conjoining anything. It would be if the meaning was something like “try, and you may be able to do this” or “try and you’ll accomplish something”. But as it stands, what’s needed here is a preposition, not a conjunction. A preposition is defined as “a word or group of words used before a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to show direction, time, place, location, spatial relationships, or to introduce an object”, and that’s what’s happening here, hence “try to do this”.
Sadly, the “try and” solecism is so entrenched now that trying to correct it is a lost cause.
It’s true that those are similar phoneticisms, so one doggie biscuit for you! But the difference is that those never had well-established written short forms the way that “mic” did. So the phoneticisms came into widespread use. Why do you think microphone inputs are always labelled “mic” and not “mike”* (or “fred”)?
* Probably someone somewhere has actually done this, but I’ve never seen it.
Dammit (not “damn it,” unless you enunciate the “n” and space) don’t you go being all logical and shit with me! I did say they were irrational pet peeves!
And I’m a cat, so doggie biscuits ain’t gonna do it for me.
Oh, yeh, and “ain’t gonna” instead of “isn’t going to” is acceptable when reproducing speech verbatim. Not in formal writing.
Now back to my sad lot in life, proofreading transcripts of verbatim testimony. And suffering through the growing ubiquity of “lay” when it should be “lie.”
A further comment. While all this is true, there’s a clearer and more succinct way of saying it. “To” is a special kind of preposition, with the special quality that when it’s used before the base (infinitive) form of a verb, it forms a verbal called an infinitive. “To do”, “to go”, “to achieve” – all of these are infinitives. “Try to do this” correctly uses the infinitive. “Try and do this” abuses the conjunction, which has no place in that sentence because there’s nothing to conjoin.
That one gets me, as does “countless” for some arbitrarily large number, but not necessarily one that cannot be counted for whatever reason.
Like the number of people who have died of malaria in history is unknowable, therefore uncountable. But the number of dead in a war or due to something like a plane crash? Definitely countable.
They don’t use “literally” for “figuratively,” they use it as a general intensifier, e.g., as a rough synonym for “extremely.”
I’m sure that depends on the person and their use. Both are sometimes true.
Yeah, that’s the usual excuse. And next, they dredge up examples of famous writers who allegedly have used it that way.
No, they haven’t. As I’ve said before, when good writers (or eloquent speakers) use “literally” as an apparent intensifier, they’re really creating a metaphor. They’re making a statement, using “literally” as an intensifier, about some description that is indeed obviously figurative, but that has a close resemblance to the object of the description – visually, emotionally, or in some other way that gives the metaphor power. They are not using it as a generic intensifier for any arbitrary description, which is the exclusive domain of illiterates.
Even some linguists – peevish descriptivists that they are – have tried to defend this poor usage. John McWhorter rattled off a list of common words that supposedly have two different and opposite meanings. No, they don’t. All of his examples are either logically flawed or irrelevant.
I’m not making excuses or defending it, I’m just being pedantic about describing how people misuse “literally.” 