I think she’s referring to the practice of addressing the envelope that way, and intentionally forgetting the stamp. That way, when it gets returned to sender for lack of postage - ha! It gets sent to the recipient anyway. I mean, stamps may be 4 times more expensive than when I was a kid, but they’re still freaking cheap.
Er, I think he was referring to that, too.
Sorry, BobLibDem, hope the reassignment wasn’t too painful 
My service always includes a road test of the car. They drive it quite some distance.
They do that because they’re compiling a quote from what eleven different people have said.
My pet peeve is poor customer service. Especially annoying is when a clerk ignores me because I’m dressed in a way s/he considers inappropriate or too casual or whatever.
~ When I can’t find the price of something in the supermarket because it’s NOT MARKED. The cheese department seems to be the worst at this. Or in other aisles the price is on the bottom of the bottom shelf in small unintelligible print and I’d have to be prone on the floor to read it.
~ Gooey lipstick left on a glass, cup, or anything. I can’t believe any man would ever want to kiss lips with that gooey bright red stuff on them.
~ When someone has a long list of things to count and they do it out loud in front of me and they don’t do it by twos.
~ Car alarms that don’t shut off after a reasonable time when it’s obvious that the owner has probably gone off with someone else for a while and is not available to stop the noise.
I guess that’s enough for this time.
Dear boyfriend,
I love you like no other, but if you keep making noises while you eat I may have to strangle you in your sleep.
love,
Me
P.S. That goes fer the rest of ya too. 
Argh mouth noises drive me batty. And my ex-MIL used to make this humming sound when she ate… Like an exhaled hum… “Chomp. Huhhhhhmmmmhhh. Chomp. Huhhhmmmm.” Drove be absolutely bonkers. Any mouth noises - even noisy kissing on TV. If anyone ever sounded like that while kissing me, I’d bite them. Horrid.
Anyone, ANYone who eats while talking on the phone to me. How rude is that? It’s unfathomable to me. I can forgive a bite or two at the beginning of the phone convo - maybe I caught them mid-chew (in which case, they shouldn’t have answered th phone, but that’s fine) but when they’re chomping away merrily through the convo, forget it. I’ve said more than once “Look, I’ll call you back when you’re done eating.” I can’t stand it.
I dunno, I guess a lot of it is childhood stuff. I am truly about as silent an eater as you’ll find - even my own mouth noises drive me insane.
Oh and **Ludovic ** - can’t you just knock? Or assume that if the strip is there in the first place, it’s because someone is there? If there was a one inch gap between the door and the frame in our restrooms, you’d better believe I’d be hanging something up to block view.
(Related to the last thought, but not really the thread. On the train the other day, a guy went to walk into the lav; looked up at the light, which was off. Tried the handle, which was unlocked, and so proceeded to walk in. Sure enough, there was a man in there, so the guy apologized and waited outside. When the occupant came out, he was pissed. Yelled the guy up one side and down the other for not having knocked first, protesting loudly over Guy# 1’s observations that there are locks and occupied lights on the doors for a reason. I always knock first out of paranoia, but I can’t imagine I’d be pissed at someone for walking in if it was due to my (intentional, according to the occupant) failure to lock the door.)
I am also a silent eater. I pride myself on being able to eat anything silently, even chips, popcorn, etc.
So, hon, you’re Not Crazy, and you can come to dinner anytime.
I tend to write my posts like that and try to edit all of them out before posting. I don’t know why.
I always hear chinese restaurant owners say “fry rice”.
“you wanna fry rice o steama rice”
It depends on where you break your syllables. There’s a restaurant in town that has it’s bathrooms labelled “Pointers” and “Setters”.
I agree. One advantage of the now standard triangle and circle* signage is that it avoids the whole problem of what to call each gender. I would like to see true parity in the use of “ladies” and “gentlemen”, but it’s probably not going to happen. “Lady”, in some contexts is used to refer to any woman, and there is definitely no such parallel with “gentleman”. “Gentleman/men”, if fact, is used in some contexts that are vaguely negative, like the strip bars that are springing up under the banner of “gentlemen’s clubs”. The word also implies advanced age, which is also somewhat true for “ladies”, but not so much.
I cringed when someone was telling me about an electronics store and how they had tons of “walkmen” and “walk-ladies”.
So there’s no doubt that we’ll continue to see men’s and ladies bathrooms, men’s and ladies clothes, and all sorts of other services and products for men and ladies.
This reminds me…I’m minorly peeved that I actually had a job at a magazine distributor, between 1997 and 1998–and I had always wanted to ask someone there if they do the inserts partly to discourage newstand reading. But I forgot to do it.
Hey dumbshits, maybe you can have your important conversation some place other than one foot in front of the doorway. Have you noticed the last few hundred people that had to squeeze past you?
And just because you aren’t on the stairway doesn’t mean you’re not blocking the stairway.
And while we’re at it junior, yer fuckin baseball cap is on ass backwards.
You’d think so, but what actually inspired me to mention that one is that there is a particular crosswalk I use where they installed special lights for the visually-impaired. The buttons at this intersection actually make a clicking noise when you press them (they also light up). What’s more, they “click” on the other side of the street from where the button was pressed. The other day, I walked up to the intersection, pressed the button once, heard the “click”, and waited. All of a sudden, I hear, “click, click, click, click…” Sure enough, a guy on the other side of the street is repeatedly pushing the button. :smack:
Because it is not incorrect. According to John Walker, an early English elocutionist:
*quote from Charles Harrington Elster’s The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations
People who clear off the dish soap and brush from the counter in the office kitchen in the middle of the day.
The fact that most workplace kitchens don’t have garbage disposals, meaning that forests of paper towels have to be used to clean off your lunch containers, before you can actually clean it, in the sink.
People who, in their houses, completely shut their bathroom doors when they’re not in use, so you can’t tell whether or not someone’s using it. I don’t like having to knock on the bathroom door, mostly because when I’m using it myself, I don’t like to have other people knocking. I need solitude.
Those stupid animated commercials for future TV shows that are shown at the bottom of the screen when the current program is showing!
Or the dumb semi-transparent station logo. I KNOW what station I’m watching!!!
People that pronounce AUNT as ONT instead of ANT!
People that instant message me saying “Can I talk to you now?” and then say nothing. I ask where are you and they say “Oh, I had to go get a donut.” or “I had to call someone.” Well, TELL ME you’re busy, moron.
Dummies in PLANETSIDE that scream “INCOMING ENEMY TROOPS!” in a base.
WHAT DIRECTION??? Give me an idea…a grid reference…something…
Well no offense to John Walker the early English elocutionist, but “captin” and “curtin” are not correct either. It’s true that the “ai” sound doesn’t get pronounced as such, but it’s replaced with a schwa sound in captain, and is dropped altogether in “curtain”. “Captin” and “curtin” are not listed as alternate pronunciations either in dictionary.com nor in my copy of Webster’s.
Perhaps “colloquial pronunciation” is another way of saying “incorrect pronunciation”.