A few of my pet peeves, more to follow soon!
1. Using "anyways" instead of "anyway".
2. The phrase "My bad".
It sounds so terribly incomplete somehow, without a follow-up noun to the phrase.
I'm rather surprised to discover that Shakespeare used it too, apparently:
"our love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow?"
3. Incorrect use of archaic English.
4. Incorrect use of French.(Or Spanish, or Italian, or Japanese, for that matter.)
I see this in a lot of shop/restaurant signs, blogs etc. I met a Frenchman
recently, and he said he was bemused to see boards blithely peppered with "la" and "le" and even " l' ", without thought for whether the noun following the pronoun was actually feminine, masculine or starting with a vowel.
5. People who've learnt British English (and spellings) throughout school suddenly switching
to American English. Yes, even those who're still in India.
6. SMS-speak. (shudder.)
7. People using "loose" when they mean "lose".
8. Corporate-speak . ("on the same page", "paradigm shift", "revert back")
9. Nouns turned into verbs. ("He lunched at noon.", "Loan me a fiver.")
10. Incorrect use of apostrophes. (It's, its, its')
12 comments:
Touch base. Not one desi knows what the hell this term means. Every blessed one has to use it all the time.
Vis-a-Vis (with a hand action to show what it means)
Happening (as in "the place is happening") This takes a great deal of mind stretching to make sense in English.
Hahahaha. I can't believe someone else also gets equally annoyed with all these things. I'm so used to gritting my teeth to a fine powder whenever I come across such stuff.
I absolutely loathe the incorrect use of French/Spanish/other foreign languages to sound oh-so-smart too. I've seen newspaper articles about something French with headings like, "Viva la France". Alright, they're cheering France and using a Spanish verb? If it's Spanish, it should've been "Viva la Francia" and if it's French, it should've been "Vive la France". Ugh. It makes me want to grab a U-gun and shoot all the offending idiots.
And I remember telling off someone very midly (of course, that term is subjective) when she raped the term "facade" (don't have a special keyboard for the accent) like this:
She: He said this on my fak-ade, man!
Me: On your what?
She: My fak-ade, you know...on my face. The word is f-a-c-a-d-e.
People say I'm too obsessed with this whole issue. Well, at least, my emails, comments, text messages are not on these lines: "mt 4 lnch wd othr frnz at 1."
Aargh. Okay, I must stop this before I pop a vein.
Since you (and Drenched too) are language freaks, here's one I HAVE to inflict upon you. Original (just occurred to me a half hour ago while discussing something with the kids)
Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful Indian princess who was extremely intelligent. Her old father, the king, wanted her to marry a royal but she was tired of all those buffoons. Her father, on the other hand, knew that most of the brainy guys were short, fat, ugly and worst of all, dark. What to do?
The king decided to import a groom. He sent his envoys to Scandinavia and asked them to get the tallest, blondest, blue-eyed-est and smartest Norseman they could find.
In due course, they returned with a fine young lad, but when the princess interviewed him, he got totally lost in her beauty and started speaking like stock market investor (or fool, as one is sometimes called), leading the princess to have him thrown to the moat monster and eventually die a spinster.
The moral? You can take the Norse to the daughter, but you can't make him think.
Hey drenched, that facade thing happened to me just yesterday! This guy said it as "fack-aid", which took a bit of lateral thinking to translate.
Cheers!
I am hooked! You are a fan of Wodehouse and Shenoy => I am your fan;).
If its somebody I know very well, I correct the email and send it back. You are aged;) so I am sure you dont see that many mails with sms language. If you were young like me (double wink), you would realize!
-Ok
..i think leetspeak is what i loathe the most - 'ossm' for 'awesome' anyone?
Har de har har.. loved the Norse pun! Say, if Hitchcock was Scandinavian, would he have made Norse by Norsewest? *slinking away before one of you bungs a brick in my direction*
Yoohoo, Drenched, Cynic:
"ossm" to find kindred spirits!
And then there's this other common mistake that gives me a toothache - dropping of articles (and conversely, superfluous articles).
Back in the Dark Ages when I was at school (grin and nod to Anonymous), some unsuspecting soul asked me, "What is time?", dropping the definite article. And since I was a know-it-all smartie back then, I replied with suitable gravity, "That is one of the most profound questions in the universe. It has flummoxed many a wise philosopher, I'm so flattered you should ask me!"
empress - the 'anonymous' hereinbefore referred to is not really anonymous, he is a wicked blogger named "ok" whose blog is http://moodswings-ok.blogspot.com/ and you should definitely visit it and cuss him soundly because he calls me the "aged one". Me! Aged! Can you believe it? I'm a mere slip of a boy of some 43 summers. But he occassionally writes really good posts, so don't send him to the guillotine just yet.
one of the regular things I face is "How's life?" to which I reply (i have memorized this profundity)
"Life is like the ripples, caused by a pebble, cast in a slow silent stream. Ever widening, disappearing, like childhood's green dreams." Usually shuts them up.
Norse by Norsewest! You're a terminal case!
NS:
Ooh now that's an answer I should memorise too!
Just swung by young mood swings' blog, haven't quite gotten round to ticking him off yet, though! *Biding my time, hehe, evil grin*
Hopping over to your blog now!
PS: If you want to know how terminal a case I really am, amble over to my other blog, but only if you're prepared to be in the forehead-slapping mood! :-D
Here's another one for the pianola
A keeper at the National Zoo in Washington DC was clawed by their normally docile panda cub, Tai Shan. Animal behaviorists are trying to determine why the fit hit the Shan.
hi fiiive.. most of these irritate me too.
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