Even though I am a Southerner at heart, it rankles me to be offered a Coke and then asked what kind I want. Um, I want a Coke, a Coca-Cola, please. “Coke” is not a generic term for all carbonated soft drinks. “Soda” or “pop” will work, but “Coke” is a brand name.
In movies women riding sidesaddle incorrectly. Or riding a sidesaddle with a leaping horn before it was invented.
Military airplanes in the wrong service (a la’ “The Rock” where Alcatraz was attacked by *AF *F-18s)
Oh, and to the Generals that say “We wear ABUs on base because we support the warfighter.” Really? Sitting around in an air conditioned office in the US and you show your support by wearing camis? No, you wear ABUs because they’re comfortable and you get to avoid dry cleaning fees. Stop being so two-faced. You’re in the Air Force, you should be proud to wear Air Force Blue. Now you just look like you’re in the Army.
Misuse of affect and effect
Misuse of their, they’re, and there.
Using “reign in” rather than “rein in”.
“Begging the question” does not mean what people think it means.
You should probably avoid Pittsburgh then.
I’m surprised no one has come in to answer the “quoth” thing. It’s because these posters have their own irrational pickiness. They believe that the attribution should never be offset with the actual quotation. If the other person didn’t say it, they reason, it does not belong in the quote box.
I suspect the same thing happens with the links. They have an idea of what the right link color is, and they are irrationally picky about it.
As for different fonts, a lot of them don’t seem to realize that the changes are visible to everyone. They do it so they can more easily see what they are typing in the WYSIWYG editor.
Though there are also those who do indeed want to stand out and add character to what they consider boring posts. The font and color options are there, so they think they should be used to make things better. It’s no different from the person who did their homework or wrote letters in various colored pens.
Also, some people are just irrationally picky about what font they use.
Electronic documents which are not justified, being in a format which accepts justification.
If it was on paper you’d justify it. If it was a magazine you’d justify it. Fuckin’ justify it!
On the same vein, collections of short stories where each one is in a different format. Would you print it like that? No? Then don’t leave the electronic version like that!
Affect, effect? No problem any more!!! Impact replaces both of them, right?
When TV shows fuck up facts that are easy to find out. Three examples:
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A character on 21 Jump St said “I grew up in ‘mun-au-chee’, New Jersey.” If you grew up there (or spent two minutes calling the borough hall), you’d know Moonachie is pronounced MOON-au-kee.
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Bernie Mac, on getting a message that his sister called “201 area code? What’s she doing in Atlantic City?” Uh, Atlantic City’s area code is 609.
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Dr. Spencer Reid of Criminal Minds is a genius. He said Halloween was based on the Celtic holiday of “sam-heen.” Genius, why not google Samhain and get the correct pronunciation of ˈsɑːwɪn?
Some unfortunately common grammar mistakes make me cringe.
- Using the word “good” when “well” would be correct, or at least better.
B. The non-word “funner”, used to mean “more fun”.
III. The sentence “Where my ink pen at?” Three cringes for the price of one.
4th. People who don’t deliberately enumerate lists incorrectly. - People who lose track of multiple negatives in sentences, as I may have done in number 4th, but I don’t think so. Correctly used, I think multiple negatives are a great way of saying “Not A” while misleading people into thinking you said “A”.
There’s a trade school that heavily advertises in my area. Mostly students raving about how great it is, how successful they’ve been, how glad they are they chose this school, etc.
Last shot is a young woman enthusiastically announcing, “I’ve never been more happier!”
You’re a damn school! Why, oh why, would someone not catch that? How is that possible?
It grates on me every time!
it’s possible because they’re assholes.
This drives me CRAZY, the claim that “funner” is not a word, but that “fun” is an adjective.
Fun was originally a noun. “We had a lot of fun.” Then its use became standard as an adjective, “She throws fun parties.” Once it’s an adjective, it can be a comparative adjective, “She throws fun parties, but mine are funner.” It can also be a superlative adjective, “Hers are fun, mine are even funner, but yours are the funnest.”
I don’t mind the claim that “fun” is NOT an adjective, but the claim that it is a special adjective drives me NUTS. (I get into a lot of fights with librarians.)
Are these regionalisms? I put #2 on Facebook and only Midwesterners had heard it. New Englanders expressed shock that ANYONE would say anything so idiotic.
I hear #3 frequently, too, here in Michigan. I feel like all 3 of these have crept up in the last decade.
My pens. Don’t touch my pens.
I’m no great fan of it either. But …
Y’alls’ proposal for the third person singular gender-nonspecific pronoun is what exactly?
Have to have the canned goods right side up in the cupboard. Can’t sleep if the peas are upside down.
User interfaces that suck.
I dislike using website forms that were designed incorrectly, as defined by a vague concept of “that’s not how I would have done it”
Most recent example: I did quite a bit of online shopping for cool stuff like under-cabinet lighting for my new kitchen. Invariably, the web sites asked for credit card numbers in a way that made things difficult, but wasn’t wrong. Most people type the numbers in with spaces between the groups, but the designer made the field only accept X number of digits. This is highlighted when I try to copy/paste my CC number from my password app, which helpfully uses spaces. Same problem happens for pasting in phone numbers in standard US format when they only want digits.
It is trivially easy for a programmer to strip the unwanted chars or use a regular expression to recognize multiple formats. But no, I paste my CC number and the last three digits are chopped off.
This changes from pickiness to justified frustration when they do stupid stuff like provide a field to type zip code, but unless you click on your zip code in the helpful auto complete list that appears, your manually typed number is deemed invalid.
A tangential annoyance: In my perfect world, all POS terminals for CC transactions would have an identical user interface. In real life I have to tell it “credit or debit” by hitting “cancel” at about half of the stores I visit. The other half of the time, the cancel button actually cancels the transaction. And each time I’m wrong the cashier sighs at my stupidity. So much wrong here.
I used to follow my peers and refer to something as “so fun”. My technical editor father beat it out of me - “It’s ‘so much fun’ and don’t you forget it, young lady.”
silvermist – do all the labels have to be perfectly facing forward?
Could that be one of those things where they deliberately change the number to avoid people making prank calls (ala 555?)
There are Canadian versions of U.S.-company web sites that stupidly reject Canadian postal codes. A Canadian postal code consists of three characters, a space, and three characters. But no. Gotta delete the space to conform.
I am not a number! I am a letter, a number, a letter, a space, a number, a letter and a number!
I doubt everyone would figure out what’s wrong, which would translate into a lost sale.
According to wikipedia