I’m guilty of similar obnoxiousness (obnoxiousity?). When I’m using the laptop and Mr. brown asks to see it, I’ll hold it up in the air and say “See?” For some reason he doesn’t find this funny.
At one time I had a manager who when approached and asked “can I ask a question”? Replied with “You just did”.
That’s another one that drives me nuts, except I am a fervent devotee to using one space between sentences. And we’ve had quite a few threads on the topic.
When a coworker gives me something they’ve written and they used two spaces between sentences, I find it almost unreadable. I’ll often do a global replace to fix it (replace every instance of “period space space” with “period space”.) It works reasonably well with the exception of abbreviations like Dr. ,e.g., cm., etc.
Merriam Webster says you are wrong.
And the article goes on to show how silly this argument is.
Do you complain about the misuse of:
I’m grinding my teeth right now because I sent someone a very succinct email this morning saying “this expense is for such-and-such, how do you want it handled?” They replied, “Handle it like this. By the way, what is it for?” I just don’t know what to say.
I’m not pedantic about much of anything, especially since pedants are usually wrong or have incomplete knowledge of what they are pedanting about, but one little quirk I’ve noticed lately is people using the word “floor” where “ground” would have normally been used. Like, say, outside. My kids do this and I’ve noticed the occasional adult do it. Is this a recent phenomenon or have I just not noticed it before? It’s clear what is meant—it just causes me to mentally flinch.
Guilty as charged, not because I don’t know what is right but I don’t know how to put a degree sign using a keyboard.
I like them but not enough to go to a show 
There are a number of ways to do it. The easiest, IMO, is to open Character Map and copy it. (In fact, that’s how I get all my Greek & special characters. I use Character Map so much that I pinned it to my taskbar.)
I’m still confused, but relish the opportunity of becoming pedantic about this if I can figure out how. I get lapis means stone, but doesn’t (didn’t) dilapidated mean pelted with stones, or having that appearance? If so – you could pelt a wooden building with stones, making it dilapidated, no?
You are SO wrong in your wrongness, Mr. Wrongy McWrongpants! I hope you stub your toe when you misjudge the two spaces to the curb to be one space!
( Yes, I know the multiple threads on this. And half of you are wrong!)
Wow. I find it hard to understand why anyone would have such a strong reaction to such a small thing?
Are you joking?
Just write 296 K, no degree symbol needed.
Similarly, why do people say “years of age” when “years old” means the same thing? You hear that a lot from the police, like “The suspect is approximately 35 years of age”. That seems like another case of using extra words unnecessarily.
Sounds like the stilted Police-ese parodied in the film ‘Idiocracy’. Idiocracy clip
This is amusing me!
Reminds me of want ads like:
…as opposed to blue in disposition?
Same here. Except in the case using a fixed width font, the difference should be miniscule. If the software doesn’t eliminate it altogether
Where did you get this “rule”?
I checked out the US National Weather Service and also Environment Canada, and both agencies always omit the space, writing temperature as (for instance) 23°C. This conforms to the the style I’ve always used, and the reason is that the degree sign itself acts as a separator, so the space is redundant.
I will grant you, however, that when discussing longitude and latitude, there is often (not always) a space between the degree symbol and the directional indicator. My guess is that the reason for this is that the latitude or longitude is either a long number with several decimal places or has minutes and seconds tacked on, so the space helps readability a bit, e.g.- 26°18’4" N.
Also, even if one insisted on inserting that useless space, I don’t know what would make you think it should come after the temperature number but before the degree sign. The degree sign is associated with the number, not the unit symbol. Writing 23° tells the reader that we mean a temperature of 23 degrees – it should be bound to the number. The “C” that comes after, whether or not preceded by a space, qualifies the units.
NIST, possibly:
A space is used between the number and the symbol to which it refers. For example: 7 m, 31.4 kg, 37 °C.
The degrees is part of the unit, not the number. It’s important so that there’s no confusion between Celsius and Coulomb, or Fahrenheit and Farad. And it should be consistent whether the number is present or not.