Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Conversation >

Misspellings which make you mad.

Page: 1 2(3)4 5 6

10:12 / 17.04.03

Ah, but it's ok if it's in a Scottish accent...

19:55 / 17.04.03

fit ye'sayin, like, Xoc, eh?

d'ye kin furry boots ah kin find they capi'uls?

The most annoying thing I've heard lately is the english use of "innit" and the end of every damn sentence.

man, i fukkn loved that when i was in london!
i loved the way "innit" and "y'nahtamean" get used.
i especially loved it when my mate tim would say "is it?".

"man, tim, you should meet my mate, he's into that shit too" says me.
"oh, is it?" says tim.

and the "y'nahtamean" instead of the glaswegian "aye totally!" also consistently rocked my eensy weensy world.

"fuck, i hate chris tarrant." says i.
"y'nahtamean?" says tim.

dude.

20:40 / 17.04.03

Strangely, I have a friend also called Tim who did a variation on this, in that he said 'Has it?' all the time.

So your conversation with my Tim would go:

"man, tim, you should meet my mate, he's into that shit too" says me.
"Haaasss it?" says tim.

01:01 / 18.04.03

if they met, would language as we know it collapse?!?

or, more likely, they would just laugh at each other for a bit, and then buy another drink.

Tryphena Absent

00:07 / 20.04.03

Past and passed. There is a difference but a large number of people seem to ignore it.

20:08 / 15.05.03

A NOTE TO OUR GENTLE READERS:

Whether you're reaching for a word that means "hatred of women" or one that means "a hater of women," be guided by this simple rule:

The negating M-I-S (as in misuse, misrule, et cetera)

and the Latin "woman," G-Y-N (as in gynecology)

will give you the results you want.

misogyny, misogynist = right (well, very wrong in factm but correctly spelled)

mysoginy, mysoginist = In!Cor!Rect!

Ah thenkew.

(Just seen it once too many today)

19:40 / 16.05.03

What really gets me is people who spell "e.g.", "i.e."

Oh, and "it will be sometime before this is finished" and "there maybe trouble ahead."

At work I was once handed, with a flourish, an immaculately spell-checked and page-headered training document entitled An incite into the [...] Contract.

19:54 / 16.05.03

"Peak" when you mean "Peek." As in "sneak peak."

And Ignatius, you are taking the piss on i.e./e.g.? Both are perfectly correct in their own circumstances—exempli gratia for a specific instance illustrating a general principle, id est for "that is"—i.e., a restatement or clarification of what's just been said. Or is it just that it drives you bugfuck when someone uses one when s/he should be using the other?

19:59 / 16.05.03

The bugfuck one. I was sneaking a complaint about misuse into a thread about spelling. :-)

21:32 / 16.05.03

"alot"

That is all.

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

00:31 / 18.05.03

"I should of gone to school more.", really gets my goat. I keep hearing my wife making this lazy mistake and always pick her up on it.

The your/you're mistake is absolutely everywhere at the moment, a case in point being here. And it ALWAYS totally narks me when I see it. It makes me wonder about the educational system, and the trend towards grammatical apathy that seems to be developing.

Another major niggle of mine (God, I am a total fucking grammar fascist!) is the inappropriate use of "it's" - this can only ever be a contraction of 'it is', it's never used to denote posession, as in 'I grabbed it's throbbing tumescence'.

Grrrrrrrr.....

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

01:33 / 18.05.03

Another one's just sprung to mind. I don't come across it very often, but whenever I do it always makes me smile.

"The vampire had a steak through his heart."

Ooooh, somebody get me a chill-pill.

The Return Of Rothkoid

02:49 / 18.05.03

"They auctioned off the home's contents."

NO THEY DIDN'T, YOU FUCKWIPE!

They auctioned the contents. That's all! Fuck's sake. Same applies to "selling off", goddamnit. There is no need for that three-letter word. At. All.

23:08 / 18.05.03

Hmm, not sure about that one. "Selling off" is possibly a journalistic cliche, but it implies to me a quick and dirty sale for easy, short-term profit rather than a considered sale at market value.

Perhaps we should have a cliche thread? I'll try and think of some.

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

23:20 / 18.05.03

One thing that's always sorta niggled me, and I'm sure I'm just being finnicky, is the American way of contracting mathematics to math, as opposed to the UK's vastly superior maths.

It's probably a cultural thing, but maths just seems far more logical to me, somehow. Or am I just trolling for a flame-war?

ONLY NICE THINGS

00:16 / 19.05.03

"PC Nazi's", rather than "PC Nazis". Definitely.

23:41 / 27.09.04

Bumping this because I have come by a professional interest in things that people are sick of seeing in print, and hope that some new members will post their peeves (and, equally, that others will post new ones).
The Words That Set Your Teeth On Edge thread is becoming derailed in this direction anyway, and even the latest outbreak of Rage rage escalated to a point where accusations of apostrophe misuse began to fly. There's clearly something in the air.
So, please, more uses and misuses that make you mad.

00:44 / 28.09.04

All right then, I've always been mildly annoyed by "definate." But the worst, the absolute worst...

...is loose when they mean lose.

Oh God, just typing it - makes me want to either loose my bowels or, alternatively, lose my shit.

00:46 / 28.09.04

Oh, and about this -

Although it's not a misspelling to do it otherwise, I always prefer it when words like colour, favour, neighbourhood, humour and such have the "u" in them.

I'll accept that from a UK poster, but when Americans put the "u" back in there I think it comes off as an incredibly pretentious attempt to seem "cultured."

ONLY NICE THINGS

07:49 / 28.09.04

Well, UK inhabitants are spelling *incorrectly* if they don't put in the "u"...

I was going to go for "misogyny", but Jack beat me to it. I would, however, like to slide briefly into pedantry from rage and point out that the "mis" in "misrule" is from the OFr (or possibly MedFr, can't be bothered to check right now) mes-, meaning "wrongly", whereas the "mis" in misogyny is from "misos", Ancient Greek for "hatred".

14:35 / 28.09.04

Then and Than - Learn the difference people!

One of my own spelling mistakes that drives me nuts:

dissapeared, instead of, disappeared

I am still spelling it wrong, aren't I?

20:35 / 28.09.04

any mistransposition of i and e

Isn't it transposition sufficient? Mistransposition sounds as though they could be transposed but it would be alright.

I'm not trying to bust you, I'm asking.

20:43 / 28.09.04

The Words That Set Your Teeth On Edge thread is becoming derailed in this direction anyway

Except that it shouldn't be, really. It's about how irritating certain words and phrases sound as opposed to how they appear on paper.

21:31 / 28.09.04

A personal favorite was when somebody was losing an argument with a friend of mine (who happens to have a fabulous aquarium) and called him a mouth-breeder (a type of fish) rather than a mouth-breather (a stupid person).

Laff riot.

21:31 / 28.09.04

Indeed. Hence, in part, bumping this thread which is the proper place for pedantry and usage peeves.
And I'm working on a style guide, so I'm interested in hearing about the kinds of misspellings, misuses, malapropisms and cliches that make you reach for the Basildon Bond. So, pithy corrective memoranda are particularly welcome (and likely to be nicked for my own ends).

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

21:52 / 28.09.04

"The cakes were eaten in one foul swoop."

It's 'fell'! It's fucking 'fell'! GET IT RIGHT!

And, as someone previously mentioned, 'alot' can go suck my chunks, it's just so not right.

23:25 / 28.09.04

damn, hover donkey, i was going to rant about 'foul swoops'....

but i have lots more! impact, for a start. objects colliding 'impact' with one another - concepts don't. they may well affect one another (now affect / effect is a whole other can or worms), but there is no impact. i fear this call is lost, however, as the vernacular will rule in the end...

o, the dynamism of language.

but i also get hot at 'myself' - as in, "you can either come and see brian, or myself"

now 'i' can't see you yourself. only you can. what is wrong with the much shorter - and indeed the correct! - "come and see me"???

what else...? oh yeah, that great americanism - 'off of'. as in "buffy, get off of the table"

yeuch

and the big one, for me - fewer / less

when will schools teach the simple premise that there are fewer whole things and less of a single thing, or amount of stuff??? it's really easy!! i hate, hate, hate hearing that our health system is coping with less nurses, or schools have less teachers, etc... what, some only have one arm?? faaaark...... grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....... [ok, calm now, calm. breathe. whhh, whhh, haaaaaaa...... om]

and fucking no capitals in text - i hate that.

: )

23:35 / 28.09.04

Ha, that reminds me of a good teacher I had in fifth grade. Our English classes were called "Language Arts," and Ms. Dator was a stickler for the basics - spelling, punctuation, grammar fundamentals.

One day she had a meltdown about the phrase "all right." She must have had to read "alright" and "allright" one too many times, because she launched into a screaming tirade, and to hammer home the proper spelling she ran to one end of a 16' chalkboard to scrawl ALL and then ran to the other end to scrawl RIGHT. "IT'S ALL RIGHT! ALL! RIGHT!"

The kids in my class were visibly terrifed. I've always thought it was funny, but then I've always been a good speller.

23:46 / 28.09.04

Oh shit! Sorry. I thought alright was at least partially correct.

Another I've been seeing: zoftig for zaftig. Zoftig looks like some kind of medication.

23:54 / 28.09.04

"The cakes were eaten in one foul swoop."

i used to pass the time in one of my classes by waiting for the teacher to say 'one foul sweep'... she did it at least once a week.

Cloned Christ on a HoverDonkey

00:45 / 29.09.04

astrojax's "off of" reminded me of another phrase that grates like razor-wire undies. I'm pretty sure it's an Americanism, and I'm also pretty sure that its grammar isn't strictly correct: "In back of", meaning 'behind'.

I know something can be "in front of" something else, so the syntax is the same, but it surely can't be right to say "in back of".

Actually, I don't care whether the grammar is correct or not; it's just plain ugly language and should be expunged from the language post-haste.

01:08 / 29.09.04

1) Misuse of the word "literally". It literally makes my blood boil. Actually, no, it doesnt. If my blood was literally boiling, i would be dead. It is only figuratively boiling. See how that works?

2) When to use "a", and when to use "an". "Hand me a apple" is wrong. It's "an apple". Use "an" when the word following it begins with a vowel and "a" when the word following it begins with a consonant: "Thats not an apple, it's a ball". Just watch out for H, though. "An hippopotamus gave me an apple". "An" before H.

3) "I'm not going nowhere." The double negative. Not going nowhere would imply that one IS going SOMEWHERE. Hopefully back to school.

01:12 / 29.09.04

i'm sure 'in back of' can't be good grammar, can it?

i mean, 'in front' means 'ahead of', or 'before' [to the fore, in the foreground] but nothing is 'in back', is it??

'out the back', 'round the back' 'in the back xxxx [yard, room, whatever...] maybe, or 'in the back' referring to a place; but just 'in back'...? how is it 'in'???

ooh, more barbed wire. grrrrrrrrr thanks hoverdonkey... ; )

i also mourn the impending disappearance of diphthongs all round, especially in american spellings of foetus, aether and other beautiful words... thank [insert object or being of persoanl divinity belief here] for the OED, eh! (would the american equivalent ever be the harvard american dictionary? the HAD!! language will then certainly have 'had' it, as we knew it...)

11:13 / 29.09.04

Crikey, I don't think even British people use 'aether' for 'ether' these days... not that I disagree with you...

I do dislike people using abbreviations such as "fuckin'", with or without the apostrophe, in text which is not reporting direct speech... I realise it is meant to denote a casual tone of voice, but, oh my, it is very annoying indeed.

Haus of Mystery

12:07 / 29.09.04

Fuckin annoyin in fact.

Continual use of the word 'like' before (and after) words.

"I was, like, really pissed off."
"So I'm, like, why should I bother?" etc...

I do it all the time.

Page: 1 2(3)4 5 6