What are your pet peeves re English usage?

Merry Andrew--

I'm a Sports Ignoramus, but I understand the early baseball teams in the states also played cricket. Baseball evolved because it was a more commercial game where cricket is oriented to the players.

Yes, Noddy, but cricket isn't anything like baseball (or vice versa). Actually, I've read that baseball evolved from a 19th Century game called One o'cat.

When I lived in England back in the 60's, I was a Parent Assistant at the local Infant (Elementary) school. At the school picnic the kids started a game with a broad bat and I said with great delight, "Cricket!"

I was flattened promptly. "Rounders or One o'cat".

May I bring up the subject of instigate vs initiate? Instigate is commonly used to mean initiate - i e to be the first to do something (I initiated the debate by throwing a cabbage at Bush). Instigate is to incite others to do something(I instigated the riot by telling my grandmother to throw a cabbage at Bush)

Well that's interesting.

Quite often flout and flaunt get juxtaposed but I'm sure none of you would make a mistake like that.

They do. By the same people who get instigate and initiate mixed up, and infer and imply, and fewer and less.

Some people!

Fellow pedant, KP

Oh aren't we all bloody pedants on this thread, ducky!? It's like having a non-pc evening and being rude about other races/the opposite sex/ill people really, self-indulgent.

It makes more sense to emphasize the first syllable: rootbeer, as opposed to regular beer. It's more logical.

We had a contest to define "imply," "infer," "intimate," and "insinuate," and no one got all four right. It's difficult to tell the difference by their context alone.

When you say "red letter" or "Aunt Mary" or "Derby winner" you stress each word approximately equally. So it should be with "ice cream" and "root beer", in my view. Each word of the phrase is equally important.

But who is to say what's wrong? Whatever floats your boat.

You can't come up with a phrase like 'who is to say what's wrong' on a thread like this! Here, we can forgo rationality and liberal tolerance and express our non-pc peeves, however mean and miserable they make us look!!

You are right in this case, of course.

Sorry, I let a little reasonableness creep in there. Shame on me. I shall be drummed out of the Grumpy Old Men Club.

Oh, not you, McT. We grumpy old men tend to be quite forgiving of each other's foibles. (And I assume the not-so-grumpy not-so-old ladies on this thread are likeminded.)

The British say "Happy New Year" with each word equally stressed, or sometimes "HAPPY new YEAR", but Americans say something which sounds like "Happy NOOyr" or even "HAPPY nooyr"

Which sounds kind of cute to me. But wrong, of course.

Even worse, they stick an S on it. Why the flying f* do they do that? It isn't possessive, and there is only one at a time.

Perhaps they mean to imply that they are wishing you only a happy New Year's Day , not a whole year? Just a wild stab in the dark.

Some Americans (and I stress the 'some' advisedly) tend to make possessives out of a lot of things which are not so. I once worked in an office building which had, on the ground floor, a store called The Agora. Agora, of course, is the Greek word for marketplace. There was a co-worker (more than one, actually) who kept refering to having bougth somewthing "at Agora's." I suspect he thought Agora was the proprietor's name.

I would like to eliminate the passive-aggressive word "Whatever". As in
it's use as an all purpose answer/but no answer, agreement/but no agreement.

"Aunt Mary, it says here that the movie starts at 2pm not at 3."
"Whatever"

Yes, we do say "Happy new years," and I've always believed it was short for "new year's day." Dunno.

Something has always seemed wrong to me about the grammar behind "God bless america." Can someone explain that to me.

SCoates -- can't explain it unless you give us a hint as to what's wrong with it grammatically. Nothing wrong with the title, "God Bless America." Or are you referring to some error in the body of the text of the hymn?