Ditto – but I haven’t relinquished my loathing of “commentate” yet.
And another second for misuse of “literally.”
its/it’s; your/you’re; there/their/they’re
I can understand that everyone makes typos (hey, I’ve done it myself when my fingers get minds of their own), but repeating the mistake just shows you don’t know the rule.
I also hate the use of “infamous” for “very famous” and “notorious” for “notable.”
Mostly, I hate when my boss makes up words. Last week she claimed one of our proofreaders had made “pederantic” comments. I think those are comments that require you to register your address with the state!
AnywayS [insert hurling smiley] This invokes throbbing temple veins.
Another vote for orientated and misuse of literally
Redundancies like exact same or general consensus
Oh, oh, I just remembered the one my coworker likes to say to torture me!
Agreeance instead of agreement. I hate Hate HATE this.
I don’t think there’s anything that irritates me as much as this. In casual speech I can live with sloppy constructions like “me and him went to the movies”, but when these idiots replace a perfectly fine “me” with that horrible unnecessary “myself” I just want to strangle something.
A pair of champions:
“personal PIN number”
“automated ATM machine”
I want to smack every DJ that I hear pronounce the Led Zeppeling song “DIE-er Maker”.
It’s bad enough hearing it said, but I had an English teacher in public school who actually wrote this on the board while giving notes:
Main Idears
That is my biggest mispronunciation pet peeve: when newscasters or commercial voice-over people mispronounce something.
The other day on the news there was an explosion involving a truck, and the news guy said that the truck “evaporized” (ee-VAH-por-ized). I think he was trying to say “evaporated” and “vaporized” at the same time, but it still bugged me.
There was a long-running commerical for a class-action lawsuit a while back where the serious voice-over guy mentioned the disease “Mesothelioma” several times – and each time, he said “mee-so-thee-lee-oma” instead of “meh-zuh-thee-lee-oma.” It struck me as wrong the first time I heard it, even though I have no idea where I’ve ever heard that word pronounced before. It kept bugging me every time I saw that ad, until I finally looked it up to make sure I was right (thank goodness for Merriam-Webster online, and their pronunciation audio files!). If I had Mesothelioma, I wouldn’t trust a law firm that doesn’t even know how to pronounce the name of my disease.
My favorite example, though, is from several years ago: I was in my car, listening to Casey Kasem’s show, and he mentioned triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13). But he prounounced the first syllable as “try-” instead of “trih-,” and he emphasized the first two syllables instead of just the fifth one. He wound up saying “TRY-SKY-dek-a-pho-bee-ya” instead of “tris-kai-dek-a-PHO-bee-ya.” I was amazed that anyone would put a word like that into Casey’s script and not make sure he knew how to pronounce it!
Anyway, I hardly ever watch the TV news anymore, but when I do it really bugs me to hear someone mispronounce something. Likewise with radio personalities … even famous ones. 
Ooh, a big second on this one.
Mr. Stuff, who sells Fords, was telling an old classmate of his that I hate it when people call them Excapes instead of Escapes, and his jovial but clueless buddy said, “Yeah, but I bet they want to excape when they hear the price, don’t they! Hee hee hee!”
:smack:
People who think penultimate means “really, really ultimate”.
Orientated
When something is very unique.
“I went to the ITT Technical Institute Of Technology”
"Bidness" for “business” (endemic throughout the South)
miss-chee-vee-ous drives me crazy.
I’m not sure if this should be considered a grammatical error or just a colloquialism, but either way it irritates me because it’s confusing.
Disclaimer: Though I have next to no accent, I’m a God-alone-knows-how-many-generations-by-now Southerner who says “y’all” and “fixing to” on a regular basis, but I hate it when somebody is giving me directions and it includes the phrase “Turn right there at the sign and go to the third house on the left.” This is a southernism that even traps southerners.
Do you mean “Make a right turn there, and then go to the third house” or do you mean “That sign right there is where you turn left, then you go to the third house”?
And almost invariably if you try to clarify this they’ll nod their heads and repeat, “Turn right there.”
Why people can’t just say “Why. . . ?” instead of “How come. . . ?”
The one that drives me bonkers is using apostrophes to mean “Here comes an S!”
How are you supposed to pronounce “auction”? That’s how m-w.com says to pronounce it.
What for?
The other two that really get on my tits are non-parallel structure (“We need eggs, milk, and I want some of that new ice cream”) and dangling modifiers (“Cycling on Park Street, a car hit her.”)
“Conversating”. I seem to remember that there was a news article for a child who got suspended for talking to his mother in Iraq. The principal said this word. Ugh.
Another vote for very unique, and its variations - my head hurts when I think about how any thing could be only partly unique.
And misuse of the word penultimate is more of the same: how can anything be more than ultimate?!?
Some people pronounce it ork-shon. They’re the same people who say Or-stray-lya.
Where I come from (England not Squaresville - everyone in Squaresville says ochson) it is generally pronounced as Orction. Same as ortomatic for automatic.