Oh God, malapropisms are The Best.
I used to work with a woman who said
archichoke (AR-ki-choke) for artichoke,
presidence (not an actual word) for precedent,
soth-more for sophomore,
and she was the secretary to the Executive Director of a very big nonprofit.
Well this is truly petty: very lately I’ve noticed the news sites using the word “boffin” rather than, say, “researchers”, or “scientists”. I know the meaning of the word, but is this 1946? Just say NASA scientists or whatever.
Yeah, I know, space constraints. So cut out something else. Boffin makes me want to read the headline as an old fashioned newsreel.
Good-holy-grief. I had to look that one up. <scratches head>
“Origin: Boffin was a common colloquial term used in Britain during WW2 for the technical experts, the backroom boys, who were helping to win the war.”
You and my father would have gotten along very well!
I disappointed him in that I rather like windchimes.
I had a professor in college who that! He had other verbal miscues as well. “Specific example” came out as “pacific eggshample.”
I don’t like the scholarly pronunciation of “processes” to have an “eez” sound at the end. (“Scholarly” as in used by university professors, scientists, and the like.) It’s not incorrect, but it strikes me as pretentious. I started a thread about it once.
This isn’t really a minor/picky peeve but something truly annoying. Anyhoo I thought I’d stick it here.
*Reeeeealy *short appliance cords. :mad:
I mean, c’mon! Not all of us live in houses with brand-new modern kitchens and plenty of counter-top outlets. My house was built in 1936, and there is one outlet at counter level. The other ONE is in the baseboard. If a short cord is a must, it doesn’t have to be six feet long, but can it at least be long enough to reach from the average counter height down to the floor? But a two-foot cord?? Which means you have to use an extension cord or a power strip and that IMHO pretty much cancels out the safety feature.
Thought of another one…
The overuse of exclamation points in emails! On every sentence! What an astonishing way to lose emphasis!!!
I hope this doesn’t sound sexist, but women are far more guilty of this then men.
It’s the Myrna Carter effect!
Really? I am so sorry that I missed that! I must do a search!
As far as I can tell, that is the only word in the English language the ends in “ESS” for which the plural can sometimes be pronounced as “EEZ”. We don’t say “recess-EZZ”.
WTF?
This is what eventually broke me from reading comic books as a youngster. At some point I realized that every sentence out of Batman’s or Superman’s mouth was either an exclamation or a question. Not a single period in the whole magazine.
People who do that are usually trying to differentiate between the noun and verb forms. John /prɑsɛsəz/ the forms vs We have automated /prɑsɛsɪz/.
I dug up this thread to gripe in a petty way about “prayers to.”
Prayers are offered to a deity or intercessor for an intention.
Aurelia prays to Mars for the success of Caesar in battle.
I pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for you to be blessed with many meatballs.
Mom prays to Saint Anthony [that he will intercede with God] for Dad to find his keys.
You don’t pray to the victims of a disaster, you pray for them. If they had power and omniscience that merited being prayed to, they probably wouldn’t be victims of a disaster.
I recently heard a sports announcer (referring to Jenner’s medals), as “…when she won them”. If he’s a she now, that 's fine, but I think he won the medals.
Dennis
Thank you, Barrett Bonden, for digging this up, I enjoy this thread!
But something very strange has happened in this thread. At least 3 of my posts are missing. A couple of other people’s posts are gone, too.
I remember making a comment to WOOKINPANUB about her not taking the coupon off the item she was purchasing.
I distinctly remember complaining about people handing me wet money while I was working at the dollar store. I remember saying it was bad enough if it was sweaty boob money, but even worse when the wet money came from their pants pocket. :eek:
Someone addressed EmilyG, thinking she was the one being handed the sweaty boob money.
EmilyG said it was not her.
Someone else went and looked it up, then quoted my original comment, because well, you know… cite?
I came back and reiterated that it was worse to be handed wet money from their pants pocket. Who knows how it got wet, and ew.
There were at least two other comments about sweaty boob money.
That’s about eight posts missing. I’ve read the whole thread twice, and all those posts are gone. 
Anyone from the first time around remember this?
People who send emails without subject lines. At my workplace there are two or three people who do this constantly. Really bugs me.