I heard my grand-niece mis-speaking the old rhyme, “Panty-cake, panty-cake, baker’s man…”
I knew a real estate agent who would use “man cave” or “man town” (ugh) to describe a rec room or something like that. Makes me picture some loser listening to sports talk radio in a beanbag chair surrounded by felt pennants all over the walls.
I thought, maybe Infovore and Pai325 are under the mistaken impression that any and all words ending in -y or -ie are diminutives. I’m used to encountering that kind of, uh… narrow-sighted stubborness on people insisting in applying comprehension rules-of-thumb to languages not their own, but only once encountered something similar in a person speaking about their own language (a woman in her 40s who rejected the notions of synonimia and polysemia: she insisted that each concept could only have one name and each word one meaning).
But by that same rule, why would skivvie or undie be ok and panty no? Those two are actual diminutives!
I kind of like “panties,” but for those who don’t, how about that genteel term used to refer to a Lady’s (including Queen Elizabeth’s) underwear, namely, “her smalls.”
In one of the James Herriot books, he talks about a client who labeled this behavior in her dog “having a case of flop-bott.”
tl;dr
“Quantum Leap” to mean large step.
On one occasion, dealing with a person I knew to be both intelligent and educated, I did correct him:
“Mark, what is a quantum particle?”
“oh… a sub-atomic particle, isn’t it?”
“And just how far do you suppose on of those leaps?”
“Really tiny…”
Haven’t tried/bothered with anyone else.
Then just use the symbol, and be done with it. It’s bad enough that people are twittering or tweeting or whatever in the first place, but I can make make peace with the fact that the phenomenon exists. There’s no reason to talk about it too.
I know for a fact that I have read the word “mullet” being used to describe a hairstyle in at least one novel not later than 1989. The Beastie Boys may deserve the credit, but not in 1994.
I missed the edit window: and now, having read the Wikipedia entry, I find myself plagued by self-doubt. now I have to decide if its worth my time to track down and re-read every book then I read in 1989.
Until I have done so, please regard my immediate previous post as provisionally retracted.
As long as I have the floor, I’m going to bring up another usage that I demand be removed from the planet. I think it might only apply to New Yorkers. When you are queued up, awaiting your turn to buy a product or to pass through a gate, or even camped out in front of the store waiting for Black Friday sales to begin, you are IN line; you are not ON line.
And we can do without any smartass remarks along the lines of “What about the guy who brought his laptop, and goes on the internet to pass the time?”
There have been enough cases of people stampeding into a business’s in their rush to get a “doorbuster deal” that have literally have busted the business’s doors, not to mention trampled other people, occasionally fatally that, unfortunately, this word is quite accurate & probably should stay. It’s the stampeding hoards that should go.
Given that horses are used to help control stampeding cattle, maybe we need a different animal to control stampeding humans. Hmmm, how about hungry lions between the double doors of Wal-Mart???
I (male, by the way) don’t have much of an issue with the general idea as above: but the specific “man cave” expression, is hot button / pet hate territory for me. Immediate association for me, with that damned “Why men don’t listen and women can’t read maps” book / series. I find same, off-pissing beyond description: taking perhaps a few grains of truth, and spinning therefrom a whole twee, cutesy, “whimsy”, wildly over-generalised, elaborate structure. Clearly tickles many people’s funny-bone; but not mine. The “back to the primeval” crap in there, about the taciturn, uncommunicative male (as opposed to the garrulous, sociable female) characteristically retiring to his cave for solo thinking-out of problems – and “firegazing” – BLEEAAUURGHHH ! Berserk generalising – it irritates the crap out of me.
Being an Air Force brat, I grew up in lots of places. I only heard “on line” in New York and later, from New Yorkers away from home. It never made sense to me. Unless there was a line drawn on the ground and everyone was standing on it.
Yeah, we use “on line” here (New York City/Long Island). I don’t see anything weird with it. I don’t know why that phrase started but it’s a standard part of speech here.
WRT “panties”, that just seems like a silly word. I hear “panties” and I think of frilly red Victoria Secret thongs or something. It’s just “underwear” to me.
A word I would like to see eliminated, not from usage, but misusage is cover, referring to song recordings. Especially since it gets misused by so many in the industry, who should know better. A new recording of an older song is not a cover. Cover has a more specific meaning.
No, you were wrong on what the term means,as a cursory glance at any good dictionary would have shown?. Although, the thread is about words/expressions that you’d like to see eliminated, which might still be the case–but it’s no way incorrect.
My cousin claimed he knew the drummer and the bass player of The Original Artists. 
Ignorance fought. But your cites are old enough, it may just be a matter of a word changing its meaning over time.
“Classic” applied to anything and everything. Particularly obnoxious is the term “instant classic.”
There’s already a perfectly good word for a new recording of an older song. Remake. Same number of syllables and ony one more letter. Calling them covers too doesn’t enhance the language a bit, but it leaves us without a concise way to refer to actual covers. So it actually diminishes the usefulness of the term.
I hate how “cowardly” is always thrown around whenever something bad happens. Yes, thugs who beat up people on the street are terrible human beings and ISIS are pretty evil. In what way, though, are they “cowardly” or “cowards”?