Oh, and Thaumaturge? I hope you ducked as that thing whooshed over your head… 
Around these parts it’s more commonly known as Gaudere’s law.
Time for a :smack:, or is this another woosh?
42 posts and nobody has a problem with people who use “myself” as anything other than a reflexive pronoun?
If there are any questions or concerns about this post, please don’t hesitate to ask my assistant or myself for clarification.
Ooh… like fingernails on a blackboard!
I realize it can also be used for emphasis (I myself feel the same way), but I object to that usage because it’s superfluous.
Oh, I’ve seen considerably worse myself abuses, believe me!
hmm, not sure I like the way that sentence parses.
At my previous job, we had these stupid Dilbertian “report on what useful things your team did” meetings every Monday. I don’t know who started it, but I regularly heard:
"…and last Thursday in response to a networking problem on the 4th floor, myself and Jim Thomson and Sue Slocumb changed four routers…"
accept-except is my #2 most hated grammatical slip up. But the #1 are the fuckers who use “downfall” in place of “downside”. God I fuckin hate that.
“Mute” used instead of “moot.”
A “mute” point would be one YOU DIDN’T FUCKING MAKE, DIMWIT!
ahem.
It’s endemic to business, especially among people who want to look like they have a large vocabulary, but do not. Much like the autmatic usage of “and I” in any circumstance, even when the speaker is the direct object of the sentence, it enrages me beyond measure.
“Angela and I are taking responsibility for getting the meeting set up” is correct – if you drop the other person, it would be rendered as “I (am) taking responsibility…”
Compare with “Please give results to Angela and I when you get them.” This is not correct. Removing the other person, we get “Please give results to I.”
It’s like 5 inches from there to “I are burning you dog” territory, people.
Yep I ducked…
c’mon…I can’t beleive no one noticed that I used the wrong ‘its’. 
Oh, yes! I hate that one, and I see it all the freaking time! I think people think it sounds smarter or more intelligent than using “me,” which it should be, most of the time.
I just got a letter from the leader of my daughter’s Youth Group and at the end, he had written, “If you have any questions, please call Dave, Jim or myself. Thanks!”
NO! That’s just wrong!
It should be, “… please call Dave, Jim or me.”
Poor way to remember. Why? Because they BOTH should have an apostrophe according to me.
Yes, “it’s” is a contraction of “it is”, but we also use the apostrophe with possessives.
“That’s Fred’s spear.”
“That’s Reginald’s parasol.”
“What’s that green thing around my watermelon?”
“That’s it’s rind.”
We use the apostrophe when making nouns possessive; however, all pronouns have a possessive form that is without an apostrophe.
Your rules would have us write, “That watermelon belongs to Fred. It’s his’s watermelon.” “It’s” as a possessive is just as wrong as “his’s” or “her’s”.
But it’s not an ordinary possessive, but a posessive pronoun: my, your, his, her, its, our, your, their.
True.
I still think that it’s tricky to remember because ‘it’ is such a strange word, not quite as “pronoun-ish” as ‘he’ and ‘she’.
“with it”, “it got away from me”, “shhhh. . .it’s around the corner.” It guess they all do function as pronouns, but in the place of much different things (e.g in “with it”, ‘it’ replaces “the buzz”, “what’s happpening”, “what’s cool”, “what’s in”, but those things dont’ have much more literal meaning than the word ‘it’), and I still don’t get what function “it” serves in a sentence like “it is hot in here.”
Actually (from dictionary.com), ‘it’ is noun if you’re referring to the tagger in the game of tag, or a neutered animal, but that’s clearly not what I meant in my previous post.
Tag playing kid: “Whose shoe is this?”
Other tag playing kid: “It’s it’s shoe.”
“Whose testicles are laying on the floor at the vet’s office?”
“Those are it’s testicles.”
Alton Brown is a god.
Emeril is a buffoon.
But neither one has a great command of the language.
I shuddered when Alton spoke of his “methodology” for making biscuits.
I cringed when Emeril told me to “utilize these onions all up.”
Fellas, bigger words are necessarily cromulent words!
I have a friend in the UK who says Mute. I busted his stones on it and he said that there they use both moot and mute.
I dunno if this is true or not, but that is what he said…
Sorry, he’s wrong. Moot and mute are in no way synonymous, neither in the UK nor anywhere else. (Apart from that linguistic wasteland known as “the internet”.)
Oh, and while I’m here… this has been done before, but it’s voila (or voilà if we’re being really picky. It is NOT “wallah”, “wullah”, “whola” (which I saw just today on this very message board!) or “viola”. How difficult is it? It has a bloody “V” at the beginning, so why are you spelling it with a “W”?
I’m sure you’re right, but… when I was telling the story to my boss and his boss, brits both, they sat nodding in agreement and neither one told me he was wrong.
Which probably means they’re simply wrong as well.
I have had coworkers defend “mute point” to me and continue to use it after I pointed out that it was wrong and explained that there was this word, “moot” that they were trying to use. One even went so far as to offer that she, in fact, meant that the point was, “…um, silent or whatever you just said.” I like her an respect her intelligence, but every time she uses this phrase (and she uses it often) I flinch.
On the British use of “moot point” vs. “mute point”, see reference.
Notably:
Yeah, but “lead” and “lead” aren’t pronounced the same. Yet we still spell them the same. And how come “lede” and “lead” are pronounced the same, and “lead” and “led” are pronounced the same, yet the two pairs are not pronounced the same?
And then there’s all the noun-verb pairs that indicate their role by switching where the stress is: “present” and “present”, “object” and “object”, “subject” and “subject”, and so on.
I think in general USians tend to avoid using diacritics in anything than can be considered an English word, even a word with a clear foreign origin like “résumé” or “naïve”. However, more recent (and therefore more ‘foreign’) French imports like “coup d’état” and “maître d’hôtel” always seem to keep their funny little squiggles. Of course, if you write for the New Yorker, you throw utterly unnecessary ones onto English letters. Why? 'Cuz it’s fun.
My general impression is that you fussy Brittanic types tend to be a little more careful in your writing than us in that respect - do Brits still use ligatures in words like “amoeba”? (Of course, any respect you have for French spellings, at least, is overshadowed by the butchering of French words. I mean, “garage”? Pronounced so as to rhyme with “carriage”? You only do that to skeeve the Frogs off, right?)
Don’t expect English spelling to be entirely predictable. It would lose its charm.