Ways in which you are annoyingly pedantic

I like to be literal, but sometimes I take it too far. Like this:

It’s cold, so I put on a jacket. Someone comes by and asks “Are you cold?” To which I truthfully say no. “So why’d you put on a jacket?” “I was cold before put on a jacket, but now I’m not.”

I’ve got to knock that off. I sound like Sheldon Cooper.

Every time someone uses “beg the question” to mean “raise the question,” I feel the compulsion to say, “No, that’s not what that means”.

That is me.

I still get annoyed when the word “decimated” is used as if it means “destroyed”. Yes, I know that this is now accepted as proper or common usage, but it still bugs me. It’s not like there wasn’t already a way to say something was destroyed or nearly completely eliminated so we had to start using a word that means “killed every tenth person” for that purpose.

Old Jewish joke:

MOTHER: Put on a jacket, it’s cold outside!
SON: If I put on a jacket, will it be warm outside?

That’s mine too! My husband looked it up once (trying to get me to drop it), and was surprised to find out I was right. Doesn’t stop me from telling him again every time I hear it, though.

I agree, but you can’t fight common usage. The Academie Francaise tries to, but phrases like ‘le weekend’ got into French anyway…

I’ve given up on correct use of apostrophes… :frowning:

I would not say it is annoyingly pedantic just because I try to be precise, it seems not fair to blame me when other people get annoyed because I am right.

I am annoying pedantic about people using comma splices while claiming they are right. :wink:

Oh, yes, that too. Like the adverb/adjective thing, just horrible.

Well and good. Less and fewer. I’m not perfect in the language myself, but those two bother me. Oh, and not adding the -ly ending to create an adverb.

The use of “farther” and “further” is one for me. When someone is describing a physical distance, it’s supposed to be “farther” (as in more “far”), and for describing advancing an idea is supposed to be “further” (as in “furthermore…”). Most of the time people get it right but for some odd reason when they get it wrong a little light goes on in my head and I have the urge to correct them (but usually don’t).

I always bristle at the use of “passive voice” to mean “any phrasing that obscures agency in a way I don’t like.”

“We have encountered difficulties processing your request” is not passive voice.
“A bomb exploded, killing five soldiers” is not passive voice.
etc….

I know people try to be precise about this, but I must have missed the class when it was explained. What’s wrong grammatically with saying “10 items or less?”

Don’t worry, it’s all fixed in newspeak.
Plus or doubleplus etc does the job. And you just need to add a ‘-ful’ to adverb any adjective.

Just accept Big Brother.

Hatlos’ They’ll Do It Every Time!

Points to non-stone building in disrepair:
“That building is really dilapidated!”

(The urge to kill)

In meetings when someone suggests something like, “lets go clockwise around the table”, I always ask, “clockwise as seen from above, or clockwise as seen from below?”

There’s nothing wrong with it. An 18th century critic named Robert Baker said he preferred this usage, and some prescriptivist grammarians picked it up and decided it was a rule.

I really hate poor capitalisation, which is ironic given my username but I can’t be bothered to change it now. Things like not capitalising proper nouns, the first person pronoun, and initialisms/acronyms really annoy me; as does random Capitalisation in the Middle of a Sentence.

Ah, that’s a new one to me. Thanks.

I usually don’t correct people unless they pay me to do it.