I’m reading a novel right now, Vintage Contemporaries by Dan Kois. At one point 2 characters have this exchange:
“Oh, so you need detritus.” (Character is in the book publishing business, I believe an editor.)
“I thought that was pronounced deTRYtus. … I suppose I’ve never said it aloud.” (This charactar is in theater, historically somewhat unreliable.)
Made me question whether I had always been pronouncing a word I kinda like and use regularly incorrectly. (I haven’t.) And then, made me wonder exactly what they were trying to have the characters communicate. This exchange came out of the blue on page 264, with no follow up on the next 5 or so pages I read before going to sleep.
Ha Ha. As a Brit, I realise that the majority of posters here are US (at least I think so)?
But having lived and worked in the US for a long time, my idioms tend to fluctuate between British and US sometimes.
This is probably the thing I am annoyingly pedantic about (meta-pedantic, I suppose) - I deeply dislike it when people enforce non-rules as if they exist (one I keep seeing is that the verb and tense of an answer must match that of the question), when people correct the pronunciation of a speaker of a different dialect from their own, or when people fight a prescriptivist stance in a battle that was already lost decades or centuries before they were born.
Not to be pedantic about “decimate”, but I can’t understand why people are pedantic about the meaning of a word which hasn’t meant what they want it to mean for hundreds of years.
Announcements from flight crews are often unnecessarily wordy:
“At this time…” You know, “now” means exactly the same thing. Why are they using three words when there’s a single word that would work just as well?
“Tampering with, disabling, or destroying the lavatory smoke detectors…” Doesn’t “tampering with” pretty much cover everything? Disabling and destroying are just more extreme forms of tampering.
Another of my favorites. I get a kick out of when at work I ask people if they have anything else to add before a proceeding is closed. I bet over 80% of them say “Not at this time.” What are they thinking? THIS is THE ONLY TIME THEY GET! What is wrong with a simple “No”?
Generally speaking, I get annoyed with people who botch common sayings and/or use the wrong words.
Decimation instead of destroyed is one.
The biggest one that’s making me grind my teeth lately is “hone in” No, it’s “home in”. Honing is something you do to a blade, homing is finding one’s way somewhere, like a homing missile. And I’m starting to hear this more and more.
And I don’t know if this is pedantic, but I get really aggravated when people use the word “resources” in management-ese to refer to people. They’re people, not mere resources along the line of binder clips, gaskets, and tubes of sealant.
What is wrong with a simple “No”?