What are your pet peeves re English usage?

what happened to Sattdi?

In Maryland, they don't recognize its existence.

Sattdi is still there, you just go crabbing on Sattdi.

Funny, glitterbag.

Another mispronunciation that I heard on TV:

Ophthalmology (noun)



Pronunciation: [ahf-thêl-'mah-lê-jee] Listen

Definition: That field of medicine treating problems of and, more generally, treating of the human eye.

Usage: Today's word has everyone gasping for the correct pronunciation. Don't ignore the [h] following the [p]; it makes the first consonant an [f] sound. Also, the second syllable contains an [l] to warm us up for the one occurring two syllables later. Now, those involved in this science are ophthalmologists and what they do is ophthalmologic or ophthalmological, ophthalmologically speaking, that is.

The cast of the TV show kept saying: "Opthalmology."

I think I have been guilty of that, Miss Letty.

Also

"Preventive" and "preventative" are both in use, and both apparently mean the same. What does the panel think? Are they interchangeable?

Am I old-fashioned in preferring the longer version?

(commonly used in the phrase "preventative medicine")

McTag. I think preventive is preferred, but language is dynamic.

When I was out tonight, my friend Lizanne said one was American, the other British usage. She may be right there.

Could very well be, Taggers. Us abbreviated Yanks may prefer the shorter version, then.<smile>

I think that, generally speaking, in the US 'preventive' is more commonly used as an adjective while 'prevantative' tends to be a noun. Thus we speak of something as being a proven preventative, but in the same breath we may speak of preventive medicine.

As a researcher in eye disease, I' never heard anything but that.

Miller's comment is incoherent. Does she claim she's never heard anything but ophthalmology, or that she's never heard anything but opthalmology? It cannot be determined from what she wrote.

I wonder if she claims to be a member of the American Academy of Ophthalmology?

It's the very same in German(y): Ophthalmologie [English 'y' is "ie" in German] (www.ophthalmologie.de) and worldwide > World Congress of Ophthalmology.

This is good. Enjoy

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,6-2358464,00.html

(an extract)

"For cynical verbal mendacity, the latest crop of military weasel words is hard to beat. All euphemisms are lies (or, at best self-deceptions) deployed to hide the ugly reality: "surgical strike" (killing the enemy); "collateral damage" (killing someone who is not the enemy); "friendly fire" (killing your own side instead of the enemy); "prisoner abuse" (torturing the enemy); "extraordinary rendition" (removing the enemy, without legal process, to another country where they may be tortured). "Smart bombs" are forgivable because they have a higher IQ. "Shock and awe" sounds sexy, not bloody. Euphemism is a weapon; it makes war easier.

...."

Excellent. I've always been partial to the expression "pacifying" the enemy. Makes it sound as though you're sticking a fake lolly in the enemy's mouth rather than beating the s**t out of him.

A new topic I've started on a similar subject:

Annoying Euphemisms

Just thought I would have another peeve, and it's about news items this time, and the overuse of the buzzword phrases like

"The kidnappers fired their AK47s"

Who the hell cares what kind of guns they were? "Rifles" is fine. "Automatic weapons" is fine. Why is it so smart to continually refer to AK47s as some kind of symbol of super-evil?
This happens a lot on the news, believe me, and it should be stopped. Now.

We don't hear that "The policeman drew his five-shot Colt long-barrelled standard issue revolver" or "The security men, armed with Uzi 9-mm assault weapons..."

So why are our news editors so fixated with Kalashnikovs?

I don't know, but they ought to change the record. Now.

I agree, McTag. Seems like just free advertising for the Kalishnikov manufacturers. I've never heard it said that the bank robber opened fire with his Smith & Wesson .38 caliber snub-nosed revolver. A similar pet peeve of mine has to do with news reporters who aren't familiar with weapons terminology at all. They'll describe almost any semi-automatic weapon as a machine gun!

This is not a peeve, merely an observation about dialect.

I was always brought up to think of dialect as "wrong" and of standard English and RP as "correct".

In Glasgow and the west of Scotland, one commonly hears "hut" as a past tense of "hit", and "youse" as a plural of "you".
Standard English makes no such distinction, relying on the circumstances to clarify what is intended by the speaker.

This facility in the dialect by which to indicate the difference, it strikes me, is quite useful.

It pains me to think that certain dialects have vanished, because many are so pleasing to the ear, McTag.

Strange, I was just looking up one such example:

Background:

Gullah is a creole form of English, indigenous to the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia (the area extends from Georgetown, SC to the Golden Isles of Georgia above Florida). Like all creoles, Gullah began as a pidgin language, transforming into a language in its own right with the first generation born in America. A similar form of plantation creole may have been widespread at one time in the southern United States, but Gullah now differs from other African-American dialects of English (which do not vary greatly from the standard syntax, pronunciation and vocabulary). Though creole languages the world over share a surprisingly similar structure, the speakers of one creole can seldom understand speakers of another on first contact.

According to David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, the word "comes from Portuguese crioulo and originally meant a person of European descent who had been born and brought up in a colonial territory. Later, it came to be applied to other people who were native to these areas, and then to the kind of language they spoke." Creole languages have been spoken on every inhabited continent, and are "English based," "French based" - even "Romany based" like Sheldru, used by Gypsies in England. Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, is just one example of an English-based creole with many similarities to Gullah -- the creole language of the Sea Islands.