What are your pet peeves re English usage?

Me neither, Roberta. I am getting a mite weary of hearing TV reporters say "continue on", however, and I just discovered why many who should know better mispronounce zoologist. All they see is "zoo", and do not bother to look at the rest of the spelling.

Feh? Up here we say "Meh"

Mame, Took a look around on the Web for definitions of feh. Far more than expected. Also looked for meh. Live and loin.

The feh I said has one origin and one meaning. It's from the Yiddish. It's the exclamation you would make make if something doesn't smell or taste good (like a rotten egg)--from the German phui (I think). The defintion can extend to things you don't like in a particular way--things you might have a distate for.

Meh:

Meh means rubbish. It means boring. It means not worth the effort, who cares, so-so, whatever. It is the all-purpose dismissive shrug of the blogger and messageboarder. And it is ubiquitous. On the I Love Music messageboard, for example, 4,010 separate discussion threads feature the use of "meh".
No one is quite sure where it comes from. Graeme Diamond, principal editor of the new word group at the Oxford English Dictionary, says it's not yet suitable for the OED, but he does have a "meh" file, and the first recorded print usage occurred in the Edmonton Sun newspaper in Canada in 2003: "Ryan Opray got voted off Survivor. Meh."

He thinks, however, it sprang into common usage from the Simpsons.

I can enlighten him further. Some credit the 2001 episode Hungry Hungry Homer with the first use of "meh" as a dismissal, when Homer asks Lisa and Bart if they want to go to the Blockoland theme park and receives the answer, "meh". But the Language Log website notes a 1995 episode in which Bart dismisses Marge's discussion of weaving with a "meh".

Some amateur etymologists on the web reckon meh is derived from Yiddish, pointing to a 1936 song that uses it as the sound of a goat bleating. A poster on Artblog.net called it a "Yiddish interjection used to express disdain that borders on apathy", but did not source it. "Many North American English interjections do have some basis in Yiddish," accepts Diamond. But does this one? "I can't say."

In any case, the word needs to pass into "widespread unselfconscious usage" before it will feature in the OED, he says. And with a print lifespan of just four years, so far, that is some distance away. But does he think it's becoming more common? "Well, I had fishcakes at lunchtime and I told someone they were ... meh."

~~~

I learned this from my nephew and his teenaged buddies. Meh. LOL

A good word to know, Mame. Thanks for the info. Don't know if it will enter into my daily lexicon, but now if I hear the word, I won't think the speaker has a speach impediment.

Usage is slightyly different for feh.

"Well, I had fishcakes at lunchtime." "So how were they?" "Feh. I bit too fishy for my taste."

Of course the above feh could easily roll into eh, suggesting just so so.

Well, I already use two of those, so I think I'll add "feh" to my vocab. Thanks for the definition If someone asks me how my dinner was, I can say, Meh! Feh, eh?

Love this. What an articulate woman you are.

I guess a zoologist (pronounced zoo) is somebody who studies zoos and should be spelled zooologist.

I've all ready posted this long ago, but it deserves revisiting because nobody seems to be listening. Dissection is pronounced dis-section' not die-section, just as dissent is not die-sent', and dissolve is not die-solve'.
I believe dissection is confused with bisection, which is pronounced bie-section.

I think that's up to the speaker, coluber... you can advance an alternative argument for the pronunciation of many words, such as "private" and "privacy" - in the UK, at least.

Can't think of any off-hand, but I don't believe all words keep their basic pronunciation when endings are added.

Here's another example of how word pronunciation changes, however: contemplate - emphasis on first syllable, yet contemplation - emphasis on third.

Reminds me of a classic moment in my childhood: I was in 2nd or 3rd grade and our teacher, having taught us bio means life and geo means earth, etc., told us that any of these words can be combined with ology, which means the study of. Thus he asked, "What would you call the study of life?" One of my classmates answered in complete earnestness, "Ologybio."

That makes perfect sense to me, Shapeless.

Me too!

Good joke, but -ology is a suffix.

Who was it played Djangology? Charlie Parker?

Reinhart himself did "Djangology." Perhaps you are thinking of Parker's "Ornithology"?

Perhaps I am. Thank you.

"Ornithology" seems appropriated for "The bird"...

Btw, Django was a neighbour here...

It's a simple and generally safe rule of thumb to think of "-ology" as a suffix that means "the study of". However, a closer look indicates that in origin, "-o-" is only a combining form, and "-logy" means "word".

Okay then, logybio, if it pleases you.

Pet peeve number one:

the damnable phrase 'the same difference'

Now look - either something is the same or it's different!

Pet peeve number 2 (back to punctuation misusage):

How to properly distinguish between plural form and a possessive pronoun -- e.g. CDs ... NOT CD's. As in this scenario: "How many CDs are there in the collection?" However this is NOT the same as "The shiny side of a CD's reflection". This misusage is very common in communication and media in general and blurs and muddies the language.