draws != drawers This dresser has five draws.
idea !=ideal I’ve got a good ideal!
Although I am a Southerner and will say y’all until the day I die, at which time, my tombstone will read “Bye, ya’ll!” I do understand the “you guys” term as used in the example by a waiter. The last thing you want to do is make anyone think they are being ignored. You may function as a singular or plural but it is not apparent in the phrase “Can I get you anything else?” that the speaker is actually targeting more than one person. The superfluous “guys” makes it sound more inclusive.
I told a poker player the other day “Please do not tell other players how to play their hands.” and the person accused me of being the meanest dealer they have ever met and muttered under their drunken breath for about 20 minutes about it. Trust me, if you say “Good Morning” people can get offended.
And for the stinkin’ record, Sir or Ma’am is a term of respect, not one indicating age. Suck it up. Whenever I hear someone say “My Daddy was Sir!” My response is always “You have a choice, you can be Sir or Ma’am, take your pick.” I deal with about 500 people a shift, I don’t have time to learn everyones name.
Sorry, I suck at apostrophes. Really. I swear I will spend a day with that style guide everyone raves about and finally get my addled brain around it.
I’m 29 and feel uncomfortable with anyone older than me calling me ‘Sir’. I would never complain about it, but I was a bartender for 7 years and the word made my customers feel uncomfortable so I stopped using it.
There are places where ‘Sir’ is too formal and inappropriate.
And those places are nowhere in the South. As much as I dislike being called “ma’am” I cannot help but be polite and call everyone (including those obviously younger than I) ma’am and sir. I have often joked that the first words a Southerner learns are sir, ma’am, please and thank you. I also have a tendency to call my children’s teachers Mr. So-and-so or Mrs. So-and-so – even the ones who are my age and went to school with me – it’s just how I was reared.
I have no explaination for it, but I find the use of the word “luxe” as opposed to “deluxe” or “luxury” annoying - even though my dictionary tells me it is a perfectly acceptable word. It just sounds like an affectation to me.
Very close, my daughters first words were please, thank you, kitty and no. I am so southern, I went back to 1733 and couldn’t find anyone from the North. And I refer to adults with her as Miss Whoever, Mr. Whoever and my close friends, Aunt Whoever. For the record, in the South, there is no age distinction on Sir or Ma’am. I use ma’am when speaking to my 2 year old.
To get back on topic. I despise the phrase “baby daddy” and “baby momma.”
I must be having a happier day than I thought I was. None of these examples made me angry, or even irritated enough to grit my teeth. I’m a little worried about that poor guy who got so mad, he wanted to join Al-Qaeda. :eek:
In Spanish it would; in English it doesn’t. But then, in Spanish you say “the head is hurting me” and in English you say “my head hurts”… what, it’s not like somebody else’s head can cause me pain, unless I’ve been headbutted! All languages have quirks and this “my friend” thing is one of those that is different in English and in Spanish - and, from what you say, the same in Spanish and in Swedish.
When I was in New Hampshire in '88, the locals used “you guys” all the time, apparently it’s extending. Us foreigners find “you” very confusing: impersonal, singular, plural? And it’s not just us, judging by how many times a poster has taken an impersonal “you” personally.
*Any idiot can “use” something. Only the most brilliant and accomplished among us can “utilize” it.
*I dislike “truly.” There’s nothing wrong with the word, but nobody says this word, they only throw it in to crummy songs and poems as a placeholder. As in, “I want to say ‘I love you’ here, because it rhymes with ‘above you,’ but it doesn’t fit the meter. I know! ‘I truly love you!’ That adds so much meaning!”
*I could do a whole thread on sports terms alone, like football announcers and their propensity for saying “in space.” My least favorite is “differential.” You’ll often hear basketball announcers talking about the “3.5 second differential” between the shot clock and game clock when they mean “difference.”
*I’ve mentioned this elsewhere: I hate copspeak, and I dislike it even more when journalists (and then readers/viewers) use it in an attempt to sound better-informed. “Rate of speed” or “velocity” when “speed” will do [just once I want to hear about someone traveling at a “high rate of slowness”], “vehicle” for “car,” “male” for “man,” all that junk.
*“Software solutions” or “photocopying solutions” or almost any kind of product solution.
Yeah, that one bugs me - and I can never think of “nowadays” when I want to explain the difference.
I had a boss, from Bangladesh, who used to say “Basically” to start every other sentence. It was actually a running joke, at times he would be talking and we would start laughing. He was a good guy and also found it funny, but couldn’t stop doing it.
I hate it when people use “text” as the past tense of text. Some people obviously do it because they’ve been told that it’s wrong to say “texted”, and they’re not capable of independent thought. Another person justified it by saying “well, you don’t say ‘I hurted…’, do you?” No, but the fact that English has a dozen or so irregular verbs (which are almost entirely Germanic in origin) which don’t change when using the simple past tense has no bearing at all on how a new verb, of Latin origin, should be conjugated. Dipshit.
I also don’t like the phrase “run-on sentence”. While we were encouraged to write well at school, I never once heard the teachers use say it.
(Apologies to people who fundementally hate the verbing of nouns like “text”.)
Kids calling grown-up women “Miss (Firstname)” I was first exposed to this when I volunteered to lead a Girl Scout troop. All of the girls and all of the leaders referred to each other as “Miss Dee” or “Miss Bonnie” I now see this at my son’s pre-school…“Miss Carol”, etc.
Drives me crazy. I was taught that, when you are a child, you address a grown-up as “Mr/Mrs. Lastname” If they give permission, then you would call them “Firstname” That’s it. No half measures involving pseudo-respect.
I’m not concerned about confusing my children - they’re pretty smart, so if I call a friend “Betty” they can figure out that I mean the same person they address as “Mrs. Smith”
Plus, it just sounds so smarmy… “Oh, Miss Betty, what a nice dress”…
Around Toronto, ‘sir’ is rarely used, except by beggars and service personnel. It has an undertone of unpleasant obsequiousness. If a stranger comes up to me and asks, “Excuse me, sir…” I am automatically on my guard against a scammer. Regular people simply say, “Excuse me…”
But then, I work in a culture where almost every one uses the first name, and the employee list is even available sorted that way. The only exceptions might be very senior members of the company, but then I’ve never dealt with them. Oh, and royalty. If I ever met the Queen, I would say 'Your Majesty" upon first meeting her, then say “Ma’am”.
I’m sure the King of Sparta is fairly possessive about applying anything to his daughter’s clitic.
Yeah, the use of a reflexive pronoun without a prior noun (or pronoun) for it to replace drives me, myself, crazy as well.
Huh, I never knew this. I always thought you brought something to something else, and you took something away from something else. I never knew it had to do with location of the speaker. For example, “The child brought the toys to the hospital,” and “The child took the toys from his house to the hospital.”
But if it’s really movement toward or away from the speaker, wouldn’t you have to know starting and ending locations for the things you’re talking about, and know whether or not the movement between one and the other brings them closer to the speaker or takes them farther away? “He brought the toys to the building next door.” “He took the toys to China.” And what about if the bringer/taker moves on an arc such that he gets no closer to nor further away from the speaker?
Interesting commentary on ingroups and how they relate to grammar, no? Well, maybe not. But possibly. Sort of feels like those 1 minute mysteries from when I was a kid, when the guy slips up and says “I’ve never been back to that restaurant!” or something ridiculous like that, not meaning to say “back” (it was slightly more complex than that, but it’s been awhile).
If everyone had perfect grammar, there would be more subtlety in language that would be communicated. But as it is, we don’t know if someone’s communicating something subtle, or just doesn’t know how to speak.
Where I grew up (Baltimore) that’s how you addressed friends and neighbors. I child would never presume to use an adult’s first name - ever! But Miss Pat or Mr. Bob indicated that you were closer than strangers, but you recognized that they were adults and you were the kid.
I’m 53, and I still refer to our old neighbors as Miss Barbara and Mr. Jack. I couldn’t possibly call them Barbara and Jack (OK, not to their faces…) By the same token, I hate hate hate when people introduce me to their kids by my first name. Much as I may love kids, I do not need a 12-year-old buddy, and I expect the kids to acknowledge me as an adult. It’s tough enough when my 23-y/o coworkers call my by my first name - uppity whippersnappers!!!
I tend to use Miss or Ma’am, depending upon how old they look in relation to my own age. If they’re around my age or younger in appearance, they get Miss. If they’re distinctly older or very obviously married with children (and at least my age-- teenage mothers don’t get this distinction in my world), they get Ma’am. I just, well, don’t think I’m old enough at nearly 25 to be a Ma’am, especially since I only look 18 without makeup. Also, this is from the perspective of one who was raised by a Northerner and a European Foreigner, so Ma’am has different connotations to me than it does to most of my Southern peers.
I am annoying when it comes to the “how are you?” questions. I always respond that I am either “well” or “doing well,” especially if the other person has already stated that they are “doing good” to my question. Is it that tough to understand that “good” describes things and “well” describes actions and states of being? This is a rule that should be clear to native speakers of languages that differentiate between “good” and “well” in their language. “I’m good/doing good” seems to describe a state of morality or that one is doing good deeds rather than that one feels a certain way.
good = adjective = to be used with nouns = does not describe actions or states of being
