The volume of the opening on the Daily Show, both music and screaming crowd. It grates my nerves SO much. GRRR!
DJs who make a game out of talking over the into to a song, right up to the last split second before the vocals start need to get smacked.
Credit card commercials where they scan the card into the machine so it appears right side up to face the camera. NO card has the magnetic strip on the friggin’ bottom.
Adding local color to make the work more realistic, but getting the details wrong. (ie. a character saying they’re from “Frisco.”). Finish your damn research or don’t bother.
Related, I find the cheering and clapping to begin The Colbert Report insufferable. I FFWD until I see him start talking. I get that it’s schtick, but I cannot tolerate even a second of it. This is why I watched it exactly twice in the first three years it was on. (Then I got a DVR.)
That’s called hitting the post, and that’s pretty much their entire job.
The fact that movie and TV writers almost always balls-up the storyline that goes “Man returns to town after X many years and discovers that a former flame has a child.” If a man is gone five years, she shouldn’t have a five-year-old when he returns, regardless of if it’s his kid or not. (Unless of course the man in question is Forest Gump, who might not have realized that his sweetie was nine months pregnant when he left.) If they want the kid to be five, he needs to be gone close to six years for the timeline to work out believably.
Thank you for this thread. My head was going to explode if I couldn’t say this somewhere.
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Some people have looks, some athletic ability- my gift is a good ear for subject-verb agreement. No matter how long a sentence is or how much crap there is between the subject and the verb, I hear when a plural subject is followed by a singular verb (and the variations of that) and it’s makin’ me NUTS! I listen exclusively to NPR in the car during my ~80-mile round-trip daily commute, and I hear this all the time. If I can remember the subject of someone’s sentence long enough to know what kind of a verb it needs, why can’t the speaker?? Lazy people will make the verb agree with the nearest noun instead of the subject of the sentence.
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“The war in Afghanistan, characterized by constant coverage of the dollars spent on tanks, guns, soldiers MAKE past conflicts…”
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At the beginning of a sentence, I mentally grab the subject out of the air and hold onto it until the verb comes along. Then I either hear the crystalline ping of agreement or the THUNK of non-agreement. There’s a whole lotta thunkin’ goin’ on. Not just on the radio. Of course, in person. I’m even getting it in a psychology lecture series I’m listening to on CDs.
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I feel better.
Also its/it’s.
Siren noises in advertisements played on the radio. These should be banned, and are actually one of the reasons I listen to the NPR station so much.
The use of the word “mom” in commercials to denote some high fallutin’ title. As in the commercial for some car manufacturer (Toyota, maybe?) where the woman starts off “I’m a mom” and then goes on to say how she would worry about her son if it weren’t for Toyota’s safety rating due to their extensive research, or some other load of crap. “A mom”? Grrrrrr, that just grates.
To me “mom” is the term of affection one uses towards one’s mother. It’s not a profession and it sure as hell doesn’t make one an efficiency expert. Well okay, in some cases it may 
but I’m sick of the term being used to convey some sort of superiority.
This or cell phone rings and beeps. I have a very distinct ring tone on my phone, but whenever I hear one on the radio, I still instinctively reach for my phone.
People who refer to musical theatre shows as having “soundtracks.” MOVIES HAVE “SOUNDTRACKS.” SHOWS HAVE “CAST RECORDINGS.”
Even worse, the mom drives out onto the field as she’s talking about how concerned she is about her son’s safety.
I KNOW the difference here, this is a pure typo thing with me, my fingers do one thing when I mean another. I’ve even been known to do this with far simpler things, which is intensely disturbing, like too for two.
Sadly this is true. I majored in broadcasting when I attended college a million years ago and this is what they teach you to do, or did. I argued with my teachers about it all the time.
There’s an advert on UK TV at the minute for a brand of yoghurt called “Nom”. The whole ad is people eating the yoghurt and making “nom nom” munchy noises. It makes the red mist descend for me for three reasons:
- The whole “om-nom-nom” thing is twee in the extreme
- Noisy eaters revolt me, and
- I could overlook all that, except that if anything’s going to make you go “Om-nom-nom” when you eat it wouldn’t be a FECKING YOGHURT!!!
Aaaaah…
Former radio DJ here. Back in the day when DJs actually had some say in which songs they played then, this was one of the great payoffs of a shift … hitting that intro just right so the singer starts right after you get done with your spiel. Hey, it’s pop radio … you want to hear the entire intro, listen to Album Oriented Radio or some mellowed-out station like that. 
Heck, our songs (actual vinyl singles back then) had stickers on 'em with the total length AND the length of the intro, just to help us DJs out so we’d know how long we had.
I also really enjoyed working out the song selections for each segment/hour so the music would fade out EXACTLY when the news/next program started, such as at the top of the hour. That’s called back-timing, and I was really good at it. Nowadays, of course, stations are either mostly automated or they have their playlists selected by computer, so all this kind of work is done by ones and zeros instead of DJ math.
I get occasionally over-the-top irate about obviously English language errors in media, but the only one that’s coming to mind at the moment is a scene from “Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets.” Snape is yelling at Ron and Harry about being seen in the flying car on the way to Hogwarts, and he says:
“You. Were. Seen. By no less than less than SEVEN muggles!”
And every single time, I yell “it’s fewer! FEWER! No FEWER than seven muggles! GGGAAAAHHHHH!” and collapse in a twitching heap.
My friends roll their eyes.
I have the same reaction to other obvious errors in other situations.
Shows geared towards 'tweens with Unlimited Screaming/Shrieking. Gah. I have a daughter who is 11. She likes shows like iCarly, Victorious, and, more recently House of Anubis (Harry Potter rip-off, anyone?). Anyway, most of the shows she likes to watch feature waaaaaaay too much shrieking/screaming, especially by teenage girls. Just sets my teeth on edge.
(Although, aside from the screaming, I find iCarly to be fairly clever and watchable, for a kids show).
People who spell yogurt with an ‘h.’
I’m British. We invented the language, we get final say on how it’s used.