Biblical Literalism
Clothing other than purely functional
Christmas (usually I don’t mind Christmas, just in December)
arm farts (I don’t really care about the world here, but I sure wish the residents of my home would tire of them)
I wouldn’t mind if the world tired of this stupid “The [First Syllable of Last Name]” nickname convention.
To be skeptical just means you like to distinguish fact from non-fact, true from non-true, known from not known, by using good reasoning. It has nothing to do with being closed-minded. To be skeptical is to be open and receptive to every idea that is supported by good reasoning, good evidence, or both. In what way, I wonder, would you prefer people to be a little bit less like this? That is, in what way would it be better for people to be more pre-disposed to believe in things that might be false, fake or made up, and* less* able to sort the wheat from the chaff for themselves?
What’s your point? Older doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘deserving of respect’. News reports of young women being hanged for witchcraft predates effective antibiotics, baby incubators, heart pacemakers and treatments for malaria.
You are dangerously close to asserting that those who comment knowledgeably on the manifest errors and shortcomings of astrology are ‘under-educated’, which is a slander and not far from an ‘ad hominem’ attack. The problem with astrology is that it doesn’t work. Every single time that professionally qualified astrologers have put their skills to the test under controlled conditions, they have failed to prove the efficacy of that which they believe in. On the other hand, none of the ‘success’ they report is distinguishable in any significant way from what a good cold reader can achieve, and I’ve demonstrated this on TV.
There can be no argument based on your own interpretation of your own experience. You can name anything in the world that you don’t believe in, and there will be someone somewhere with personal testimony as sincere as your own who believes it has been effective or helpful. This is why ‘it seems useful to me’ doesn’t tell us anything - after all, perhaps you’ve never tried to break the hypothesis, and perhaps you’re being selective (only noting the times when the experience corroborates the hypothesis). This is why we can try to apply good reasoning and good evidential investigation to look into whether or not astrology actually works. We have. It doesn’t. If you think I’m ‘under-educated’ about this, let’s swap credentials to be discussing this matter and we’ll see who comes out as better educated and better informed on this subject. Alternatively, keep your personal brand of slander and value judgements out of it.
“Momentarily” has had the sense you are objecting to for almost four hundred years - about the same length of time it has been used to mean “for a moment.”
True, it is more usual in North American English - but can you get any more North American?
It’s not a momentary aberration, and it won’t be going away momentarily.
Of course, if you want to avoid confusion you can always suggest that the offenders use “shortly,” instead. No, wait… Same problem… 
For my part, I wish people would stop swallowing pseudo-scientific products. Hello, provitamins do not provide any benefit to the consumer unless they are metabolised; your hair does not need a topical multivitamin any more than than your pants do. Stop encouraging them. Eeesh.
Sadly enough, I get to meet these kids in real life (and some of my adult peers are “these kids”) and it’s difficult not to make a weird face when J’Nette and Zhardoné have to spell their names for me or “correct” me.
One thing I hate are jewelry commercials. Just because I have a vagina doesn’t mean I’m an entitled whore who needs to be coated in encrusted jewels for every gift giving and non-gift giving holiday. In fact, I very rarely even want to wear jewelry, so it’d be a waste.
I hate when small children of business owners are used to advertise the parents’ stores. Your kid isn’t old enough to sound “normal” on television, they’re awkward, and the way they say those cutesy phrases you’ve fed them makes me want to beat you with a stick. The local KIA dealership has this kid with a squeaky voice who always says “We wanna see ya in a KIA” ( :rolleyes: ) and it gets played over and over and over again on the local channels. The holiday one was the worst.
Making the world revolve around children. My local Tesco forces adults to park about a million miles away from the store, due to the endless lanes of disabled and “parent and child” parking spaces. There’s a childhood obesity epidemic! Make them walk! It’s not one hundred years ago that most of these kids would have been preparing for a life down the mines at age twelve, now they’re too good to walk across a car park?
I could understand “babies and parent” parking spaces, for prams and pushchairs, but everytime I go shopping there’s ten and twelve year olds parking there with their parents.
Bad hats and fat-guy-painted-torsos at football games.
You would understand if you were little Britadison’s soccer coach.
You see, dad pirates cable and then he tells little Britadison all about it (in complete detail) and then little Britadison tells one of her friends who relays this information to the soccer coach who drops a dime on her dad and sends him to the pokey. Without dad’s substansial salary he makes selling stereos out of the back of his truck, little Britadison can’t pay the league fees for her soccer team and she has turn in her shin guards.
Now, do you really want to pirate cable? Do you really want to take soccer away from little Britadison? Won’t somebody think of the children?
Justin_Bailey, I think the better argument there would be, “Stop snitching on cable pirates, or we’ll take soccer away from the children!”
I wonder why they didn’t use that one?
I wish people would tire of telling me what to do “before I die”. I understand that my ability to visit exotic places, play sports, watch movies, and read books will cease with death. I don’t need to be reminded of this every time someone writes a book or a newspaper article or an SDMB thread with a list in it.
I would seriously second this one - it implies that unless you’re spending every moment of your life working towards your next “project” to enrich your life you’re going to end up catapulted to your deathbed filled with nothing but regret for all the things you didn’t do.