There are some recurring errors that make no sense, but happen anyway.
A good (actually bad) example is one that only started popping up in the last ten years - for some reason people started abbreviating the term “et cetera” as ect. instead of etc. And the error has picked up momentum. Blech.
It’s a recent thing, probably shortly after 9/11, but with nothing to do with terrorism. Probably an effort to avoid “Abbot and Costello” type exchanges with parts and service people. 
Come, crown my brow with leaves of myrtle;
I know the tortoise is a turtle.
Come, carve my name in stone immortal;
I know the turtoise is a tortle.
– Ogden Nash
It annoys me when people say “I’m going to try and” do something when what they should say is “I’m going to try to” do something.
I’d been enjoying this thread, snorting with derision, until I saw this. Busted me.
I think “ect.” would make perfect sense to the knuckleheads who pronounce it “eck-set-ruh.”
Two men tried to succeed in the field of political commentary. Pundit and pundint.
People that use stay for live. I stays at a house on Elm Street. :eek:
No you don’t. You live in a house on Elm Street.
People who ask “can you loan me 5 bucks” rather than asking if I’ll lend them 5 bucks. (Still no.)
I always notice that - it seems to be a feature of Black Engkish Vernacular, like “here go” for “here is” - but I see nothing wrong with it. There’s no reason that “stay” cannot describe the action of occupying a dwelling just as accurately as “live”.
Are these the sort of folks who skip out on 6 months unpaid rent roughly every 6 months? Or do a lot of couch-surfing between stable living arrangements? Or perhaps go through one live-together BF/GF after another? Even if they don’t live that way now, did they perhaps live that way growing up?
If so, “I stay at Elm street” might be more appropriate than you give it credit for.
The DEFCON scale is an example of something people actually get wrong. The scale has a direction, and it’s not determined by popular usage.
However a lot of the other ‘wrong facts’ given so far are questions of English usage, which in the long run is determined by popular usage. You can say you don’t like the way for example disinterested has come to mean ‘having no interest’ when at one time it only meant ‘not influenced by considerations of personal advantage’, but the toothpaste is out of the tube. Same with ‘belie’, ‘beg the question’ etc where what used to be viewed as common but wrong usage has now found its way into dictionaries alongside the formerly exclusive right usage.
And if dictionary writers are the people ‘getting little facts wrong’ that seems to me a different category than getting the DEFCON scale backwards.
Insisting on ‘gull’ rather than ‘seagull’ is in yet another category, just an affectation, with due respect. Maybe seagull is wrong in a serious discussion of birds, but not in every day general use.
More accurate, I’d say, except for shut-ins. Is none of your life outside your home?
This remind me of a fish tank I saw , there were snails trying to climb out of tank and when they almost got the top a woman pushed them back. I asked her where she got the snails from and she said from the garden. :smack:
Poor snails were being drowned and trying escape , I told the woman she had the wrong kind of snails in the tanks
Most people don’t like to be corrected in public or on line . I do have a neighbor that would drive you nutty ! She calls wild animals ‘foreign animals’ and think rabbits eat rats and that bees only like to get pollen from apples tree.
Algae, larvae, antennae, vertebrae: all plural, and all properly pronounced with a long E sound for the last syllable!
Also, meiosis is properly pronounced my-oh-sis, NOT me-oh-sis!
Cite- any print dictionary in the U.S., and all my bio profs back in college.
This one is new to me. Why isn’t a robin a robin?
(There was a fun Batman comic where the Joker was teasing Robin about being of the genus Turdus…)
This is a Robin: European robin - Wikipedia
Actually, anything that is named a Robin, is a Robin - again, it’s a common name, not a scientific label.
As your own link says, when they were named both the UK/EU robin and the US/NA robin were believed to be species of thrush. So cousins of a sort.
Later evidence shows them to be much less related than originally thought. Oh well; names are inherently arbitrary labels with just enough underlying logic to confuse us.
Well, it has been the vernacular for 200 years. Ever hear of a bison hunter, or a bison rifle or a bison gal? Or Bison Bill? :rolleyes:
Dennis
still wrong though
Makes me crazy when people claim this is some kind of test of optimism. My response is always “If you are filling the glass, it’s half full. If you are pouring or drinking out of it, it’s half empty.”
Woman sounds about as bright as the mother of a client who thought there was some kind of law that anything on TV had to be true, so if she saw a documentary about how the moon landing was faked, well, then, the moon landing was faked, and that was the end of it. Also, anything on a commercial was true. There was a law that they couldn’t lie.
I realize there are regulations about things like food that has to be faked to hold up under lights (like ice cream that is really potato flakes) not being made to look better that the real thing, but that’s not what she’s talking about, although it may be the source of her confusion.