What you say drives me crazy.

[Twitch]

Ah yes but is it in-surance or insur-ance?

 

[Lady Day]

What I notice, when Im chatting with folks Im not too familure with, I tend to dumb my speech down, if I think they (haven proven they have by the 5 min of speech we have exchanged) seem to be a little verbally challenged.

Ive done the "I dont know," or the "well um . . . yeah, you know," and I hate myself for it.

But I refuse to "like" all the time. I have a buffer running in my head and when I feel a "like" moment like, about it happen, I like pause and like, stop and think it over and like, find another way to like say again, like what I was gonna like say.

The buffer is off now. Im about to go to sleep

like LD

 

[Robert Conway]

People who use the word 'like' multiple times in every sentence drive me absolutely nuts.

"And like the ball, it was like yellow!"

Huh? Excuse me?:eusa_doh:

People who speak like that are about as pleasant to listen to, as chewing on a piece of tinfoil. Here in southern California this practice has reached epidemic proportions.

One other thing that drives me nuts is the recent trend to deliver every line, buy raising the emphasis at the end of the sentence like it is a question. I suppose it's called Valley Girl talk, but it drives me insane.

Also many people do not form long, precise and informative sentences anymore. Instead the speak in concepts. "It was like yellow." Instead of "It was a cool, lemon yellow." Most people are stupid.

 

[skinnychik]

Q: How are you?
A: Good.

As opposed to evil?
Yet I find myself responding this way sometimes because that is how a customer responded when I asked. I don't want to sound like I'm correcting them when they reciprocate.

Q: How are you?
A: Good. You?
Q: Fine, thank you.
A: <grimace> Are you an English teacher or something?

 

[The Wolf]

That's ironic, I was just talking about this

Which is not ironic: it is co-incidental.
For a while "up to... and more" was popular. I read many articles and saw many interviews in which people would say things like "up to fifty people and more showed up." What does that mean? If it was "up to" then there couldn't be more.
I find it amusing when people "I" instead of "me" so they won't sound ignorant. However, "That belongs to Henry and me" is correct.
There are many more but I'm just kvetching now.

Sincerely,
The Wolf

 

[The Wolf]

skinnychik, "fine, thank you" is not a question.
Okay, now I'm kvetching.

The Wolf

 

[skinnychik]

Oops, sorry. I'd edit it now, but then your post wouldn't make any sense. I'll have to live with the error.:eusa_doh:

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

People who use the word 'like' multiple in every sentence drive me absolutely nuts.

"And like the ball, it was like yellow!"

Huh? Excuse me?:eusa_doh:

People who speak like that are about as pleasant to listen to, as chewing on a piece of tinfoil. Here in southern California this practice has reached epidemic proportions.

One other thing that drives me nuts is the recent trend to deliver every line, buy raising the emphasis at the end of the sentence like it is a question. I suppose it's called Valley Girl talk, but it drives me insane.

Also most people do not form long, precise and informative sentences anymore. Instead the speak in concepts. "It was like yellow." Instead of "It was a cool, lemon yellow." Most people are stupid.

Do you still have, like Valley Girls?
I just heard that song not too long ago, hilarious! lol
But is it an exageration, or do they actually talk like that all the time?

 

[Senator Jack]

Posted by Pilgrim:
The late, great Ian Fleming pointed out something in one of his novels which I didn't realize prior to reading it there:

"Presently" means in the near future. It does NOT mean "now".

"At present" means NOW.

I don't hear "presently" used correctly one time in 100.

Here's a perfectly good word that has been so misused over the years that you're not allowed to use it correctly any more. When I'm on a job and some importunate lout wants me to help them, I say very politely 'I'll be with you presently.' Invariably, some would-be intellectual will try to correct me on that usage by pointing out 'That means you're with him now,' and then I have to get in an argument. I think what riles me more than the misuse of a word is being miscorrected on that usage.

As noted elsewhere, we can add jejune and decimate to this list - the latter, I recall, having been used of late in a New York Times article in this rather odd context:

'After the breakup of her marriage, she was emotionally decimated.'

Huh? Her emotions were made thinner? I should like the writer to explain how one goes about killing every tenth emotion. It must be a quite fascinating process. It's this sort of idiocy, perpetuated by the media, that contributes to the decline of proper English.

Regards,

Senator Jack

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think it's the decline of active reading, more than anything else, that contributes to all this. The number of people who never read as much as a daily newspaper, let alone serious magazines or books, is increasing all the time. And the more people take all their information and entertainment from electronic media, the more they're immersed in a world where everything, including language, must be reduced to the lowest common denominator. And the more that happens the more the traditional media must be dumbed down if they want to retain any readership at all.

When I was working as a reporter, I was told I had to restrict my vocabulary to an eighth grade level. Today I suspect it's even lower -- the average paper nowadays reminds me of the sort of thing I was seeing in My Weekly Reader when I was nine.

 

[indyjim]

I think one of the things that bothers me is when people use a preposition to end a sentence with.....i.e "Where is it at?"

 

[fortworthgal]

I'm a grammar nazi, it is part of my job! Everyone makes mistakes, particularly online, so I generally just glaze over it. I admit that I say "like" with some frequency.

However...

How about the completely fictional yet widely used word, "irregardless"?

.

I despise this, and I hear that "word" used constantly! How did this non-word suddenly become so popular?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I actually did some research once on "Irregardless," and from what I could dig up it started out as a Midwestern dialect word early in the 20th Century -- basically, it was "regardless" with the unstressed initial syllable sloughed off and then replaced by "Irre," from "irrespective," as a fancified way of showing emphasis. This was a common habit in the dialects of many rural populations of the time, especially in the South and Midwest.

It was in wide use as slang/nonstandard speech by the turn of the 1920s -- it was never meant to be taken seriously as a word, more as a sort of a humorous way of underlining a point, but as it became more and more common people forgot that distinction and it started to get absorbed into everyday speech.

 

[scotrace]

I think one of the things that bothers me is when people use a preposition to end a sentence with.....i.e "Where is it at?"

Up with which I will not put.

 

[Pilgrim]

I teach graduate courses online, and I am quite aware that I have a reputation as "The Writing Nazi". I don't care. If a student paper has an undue number of punctuation, grammar, spelling or structural errors such as sentence fragments, I give the paper a failing grade and offer to let them re-write it - but I URGE them to have it proofread by someone else before re-submitting.

When I read a paper with numerous errors, I find myself unable to concentrate on the topic because the errors keep interfering with the flow, and therefore with my concentration. I won't have it.

Further, I absolutely REFUSE to issue a graduate degree to any student who has not demonstrated that he/she can write with precision, clarity and accuracy. If they can't, they are not doing graduate level work and have not achieved skill levels that justify giving them a degree. Period, no negotiation on my part. That position means that I cannot give a student a passing grade in an individual course unless they are able to express themselves in writing.

And when a student asks me to be their master's project advisor, I make the above VERY clear to them. I have learned that it's important for them to know this before they accept me as an advisor.

 

[Lady Day]

I think it's the decline of active reading, more than anything else, that contributes to all this.

I also think 'trendy' spellings on a lot of products you buy today have hurt future generations. When I was a kid, Id read the cereal box up and down. Now the Captain has become Cap'n, poor guy.

Hott, kewl, Cap'n, skool, madd, veggie, ez, sez, and the perpetual onslaught of trendy name spellings. I cant spell to save my life. I never have been able to spell very well, so I rely on spell check or most things. But grammar is a big thing to me and I hate reading something that does not flow.

LD

 

[ITG]

When I read a paper with numerous errors, I find myself unable to concentrate on the topic because the errors keep interfering with the flow, and therefore with my concentration. I won't have it.

Try doing that but with writing from 10 year olds. I did this for 7 years and sometimes I had no clue what a story was about. Then try finding classtime to work with each of the children to go over their papers with them. Very difficult. But I also had some writers where I was just amazed at what they could write at such a young age. But you're right if you're doing graduate level work, you should be able to communicate clearly with minimal grammatical errors.

 

[The Reno Kid]

My language beef is the mainstreaming of obscenities. Now, I've been known to cut loose with a few choice syllables myself after jamming my hand in a door or dropping something on my foot or stabbing myself in the thumb with a needle -- but there's too many people nowadays who inject certain four-letter Anglo-Saxon words into every phrase and every sentence as general purpose intensifiers, and that gets real old real fast. I talk to my fifteen-year-old niece, and hear her casually using words that would've made my grandfather blush, and it makes my head hurt....

I'm with Lizzie on this one. I have to admit that I used to talk like a stevedore myself. But I read something one day that really made me think. I don't remember the exact quote but the thrust of it was something like this:

A speaker who is forced to resort to four-letter in order to make a point betrays a shallowness of thought. By using the most extreme words to express one's thoughts one robs English of its power of subtle expression.

Besides, it just sounds coarse. I've managed to "kick the habit" for the most part. Of course, like any habit, it requires constant vigilance. I think the universal use of obscenities is just a symptom of a larger cultural decline. However, we can all try to at least improve our own little part of the world. We don't have to be prudes, but it can't hurt to try to set a good example.

 

[Sefton]

I'm with Lizzie on this one. I have to admit that I used to talk like a stevedore myself. But I read something one day that really made me think. I don't remember the exact quote but the thrust of it was something like this:

A speaker who is forced to resort to four-letter in order to make a point betrays a shallowness of thought. By using the most extreme words to express one's thoughts one robs English of its power of subtle expression.

Besides, it just sounds coarse. I've managed to "kick the habit" for the most part. Of course, like any habit, it requires constant vigilance. I think the universal use of obscenities is just a symptom of a larger cultural decline. However, we can all try to at least improve our own little part of the world. We don't have to be prudes, but it can't hurt to try to set a good example.

I have a suggestion;keep a notepad and pencil handy. If you find that you've used a profanity (or an "irregardless" ) make a note of it. Be sure to record the date. It's not really that difficult of a task and it does work. I used this method and was able to prune the occasional four letter words from my vocabulary.

 

[The Reno Kid]

Good idea! Anything we can do to increase the level of civility in our society (even a little bit) is a step in the right direction.