What are your pet peeves re English usage?

and then there are words with double meanings that often get used incorrectly. One would think "cavalier" to denote a singer of songs, but then we find that cavalier treatment, especially to a lady, is anything but that.

McTag wrote:

Do you mean wrongly?

Ba-da-BING!

Liaise is a stupid word anyhow. It's just another example of making an inappropriate verb out of a perfectly respactable noun -- liaison.

McTag wrote:

Do you mean wrongly?

... wrongly it is.

Steve 41oo wrote:

McTag wrote:

Do you mean wrongly?

... wrongly it is.

Both 'wrong' and 'wrongly' are adverb forms.

Letty wrote:

and then there are words with double meanings that often get used incorrectly. One would think "cavalier" to denote a singer of songs, but then we find that cavalier treatment, especially to a lady, is anything but that.

Singer of songs?

Right. Or a 'galant' (That's the way, how it's used as a German word, btw.)

Merry Andrew wrote:

McTag wrote:

Do you mean wrongly?

Ba-da-BING!

Liaise is a stupid word anyhow. It's just another example of making an inappropriate verb out of a perfectly respactable noun -- liaison.

Double ba-da-bing, Merry Andrew.

Making verbs out of nouns is perfectly natural. It is one of the things that makes English English and if we were to englishify, say Japanese, they could increase the number of verbs in their language dramatically.

I'm not familiar with the word "grwon", Merry, and I have long considered myself a student of the english language.

Would you be kind enough to offer the meaning of the word, and, if it wouldn't be too much trouble, could you use it in a sentence?

Gus(trying to act like Joe Nation and always curious about new words)Ratzenhofer

JTT wrote:

Merry Andrew wrote:

McTag wrote:

Do you mean wrongly?

Ba-da-BING!

Liaise is a stupid word anyhow. It's just another example of making an inappropriate verb out of a perfectly respactable noun -- liaison.

Double ba-da-bing, Merry Andrew.

Making verbs out of nouns is perfectly natural. It is one of the things that makes English English and if we were to englishify, say Japanese, they could increase the number of verbs in their language dramatically.

Y'know, JTT, the very instant that I hit the 'send' button, I knew, absolutely knew that you'd pick up on that. What better way to bring ol' JTT back into the conversation? [As a matter of fact, I'm well aware that one of the ways the English language has grwon over the past few hundred years is by 'verbalizing' nouns. It still grates on my ear, though, and I can't help despising words e.g. access used as verbs. There you are. I can't help it (and I disagree that 'wrong' may be used as an adverb without the -ly suffix).]

Americanisms

wanna
gotto
aluminum (there should be a second 'i' in it)

If you listen to old Motown songs recorded by artists from Maine to Georgia then West as far as Texas, you can hear the same word pronounced different ways such "gotto", "gatta" "gonna" all intended to mean the two actual words "going to". It's the way you would hear it, but not the way you would spell it. Regional accents in the US are so astonishingly different even with everyone speaking American English that sometimes we communicate better thru written words than by spoken words.

My husband was born and raised in North Carolina and I was born in Baltimore Maryland. We've been married close to 30 years and we still have to do the occasional interpretation for each other. There was definitely a little culture shock for each of us as we introduced our families and we were only about 600 miles from each other growing up.
Things that seemed to stay the same were large family dinners and gatherings, but the food served could be worlds apart depending on the family/local custom.

Anyhow, these are simply my own observations. And maybe it's possible that I find it all interesting because of all the different cultures we were exposed to growing up near Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

glitterbag wrote:

If you listen to old Motown songs recorded by artists from Maine to Georgia then West as far as Texas, you can hear the same word pronounced different ways such "gotto", "gatta" "gonna" all intended to mean the two actual words "going to". It's the way you would hear it, but not the way you would spell it. Regional accents in the US are so astonishingly different even with everyone speaking American English that sometimes we communicate better thru written words than by spoken words.

My husband was born and raised in North Carolina and I was born in Baltimore Maryland. We've been married close to 30 years and we still have to do the occasional interpretation for each other. There was definitely a little culture shock for each of us as we introduced our families and we were only about 600 miles from each other growing up.
Things that seemed to stay the same were large family dinners and gatherings, but the food served could be worlds apart depending on the family/local custom.

Anyhow, these are simply my own observations. And maybe it's possible that I find it all interesting because of all the different cultures we were exposed to growing up near Baltimore and Washington, D.C.

Hi, Glitter!

A Baltimore accent is in a class by itself (much like a Boston accent). I can identify a Marylander immediately where most Yankees think it's just a Southern accent. There is no such thing as a "Southern" accent. A Tidewater Virginian sounds nothing whatever like a Louisiana Creole. And don't get me started on Texans. But Maryland is quite unique. If you have an ear for the spoken word, you can't miss it.