What are your pet peeves re English usage?

Uncle Spendy is dead right.

Jealousy refers to oneself, one's possessions or what is perceived as belonging to oneself.

Envy is directed to others.

thank you all. Of course I knew that...now you reminded me. All is crystal clear, or was until I looked in Chambers dictionary

Aha, looks like Chambers has got it wrong too.

Certainly, the meaning seems to be shifting....too quickly for my liking.

You mean spendi got something right for a change? Thank goodness! I was losing hope about this pub-loving chap.

actually spendi gets quite a lot of things right. but as eric morcambe said, not necessarily in the right order.

That's right.

For instance--it is Umble Pie and not Humble Pie. The H came into use when Christianity extolled humility as a virtue which it was emphatically not before then.

It was basically offal pie with a shortcrust pastry. The offal was what the high and mighty left to hoi polloi. They were humble because it was either that or some pretty dire correctives.

It doesn't seem all that far fetched to wonder whether Christianity disappearing will bring a return to those days. Aldous Huxley did wonder.

Anyone who fails to understand the wonders of Christianity would do well to read some history of the sort they don't do in schools. It would be really silly to be found on a soapbox preaching the evils of Christianity on the basis of what one had been taught in schools and to which one had not taken the trouble to add to in later life. And possibly from a homosexual history teacher who had a serious bitch against The Holy Bible.

That doesn't apply to the un-meek of course. The top dogs in the "struggle for existence." They have a decent enough reason I think we might all agree.

Like when the stall erection team foreman called at Macs to explain about his (Mac's) having complained about the cheesecake.

When the ******* meek can complain about the ******* cheesecake and get a letter of apology, some beer vouchers and some other ******* thing in order to smooth his ruffled feathers and plead with him to continue his valued patronage and not to bad-mouth them all over the ******* district you have to admit we have made serious progress under banner of the Cross.

We meek have the fuckers by the short hairs it seems to me when that's just an ordinary everyday tale in the folkways of our Sceptered Isle. Boring even. Until you think about it.

Mac has form in this regard. If you invite him into your home make sure you have your Thirty Party House Insurance paid up to date.

Coming back from the Xmas Market this evening (no, didn't see Dorothy) I had the radio on Radio 2 and that was a mistake. It was "Friday Night Is Music Night" in honour of a chap who writes theme music...."Jewel In The Crown", "Bergerac" and suchlike stuff and I had a think to myself that this stuff is to music as chewing gum is to food, so I turned it off.

Damn, I thought I was on The British Thread. Apologies.

You could complain to Bob and ask him why he can't switch your kit to what you are thinking about, automatically.

I just respond to a post irrespective of the thread. If that wasn't on topic I won't be.

I think the grammar in these examples holds true in both British and Yank English.
#2 is wrong because it uses the subjective first person singular pronoun "I" as one of the objects of the sentence, when it should only be used in the subject.

(The "subject" is the person or thing or things performing the action in the sentence. The "object" is the person or thing or things to which the action is being done. If the subject or the object consists of more than one person or thing, it is called a "compound" subject or object.)

This is a very common mistake that results, I think, from so many of our elementary school teachers chiding us for saying things like "Billy and me are going out to the playground." Their intent was to teach us that the pronoun "me" should only be used as an object in a sentence, not as a subject, and rightly so. Instead, however, it seems most of us came away thinking there is something inherently wrong with using "and me" in a sentence at all. In fact, it's perfectly correct to say "Sam gave the coin to Jeff and me.", but it is NOT correct to say "Sam gave the coin to Jeff and I".
Luckily for me, at some point one of my teachers gave me this advice: If you want to know if you're using the correct pronoun, break up the compound subject / object into 2 parts and create a separate sentence for each. Ex.
"Sam gave the coin to Jeff and I."
becomes:
"Sam gave the coin to Jeff." and "Sam gave the coin to I." ????
(Does this sound correct? No. Because "I" is being used as an object, when it should only be used as a subject.)
So the 2nd sentence becomes instead,
"Sam gave the coin to me." (That's better)
and the whole sentence then becomes
"Sam gave the coin to Jeff and me."

Now how about "Sam and me gave the coin to Jeff."
This becomes:
"Sam gave the coin to Jeff." and "Me gave the coin to Jeff." ????
This is obviously wrong, so we change it to,
"I gave the coin to Jeff."
And the whole sentence then becomes,
"Sam and I gave the coin to Jeff."

The other rule is to always place oneself last in a compound subject or object. (Think of it as being polite.)
Ex "Sam gave the coin to Jeff and me." NOT "Sam gave the coin to me and Jeff."
and "Sam and I gave the coin to Jeff." NOT "I and Sam gave the coin to Jeff."
__________________________________________________

You are correct in saying that #4 is correct as it is written in the example.
It would be incorrect to say, "The red white and blue", which I think is the usage that ailsagirl is deprecating.

As for the Americanization of English words, I think it's just a matter of what you're used to. For example, I find it distracting when reading British authors, who use the words "flavour" and "colour" and "honor" instead of "flavor" and "color" and "honor", and who say "Straight away" instead of "right away", and "Right!" instead of "Alright". There are many others. In this case, I think it is just accustomed cultural norms.

And, by the way, I like the English as well. My cousin is married to one, and lives with him in England.

It's a damn good thing that we had teachers like this or English speakers would never know their pronouns.

I wonder how they explain,

You and you gave the coins to you and you.

I've resurrecting this old horse to highlight just how stupid a great many of the prescriptions that have filled this thread are. Setanta long ago predicted its imminent demise, yet it stubbornly persisted, and that's a good thing.

These two particular articles don't deal with a specific peeve, they deal with a number of them but more importantly, they illustrate just how dumb most peeves and most prescriptions are. Anyway, read on.

I heard a horror on the local BBC radio station last week:

The announcer said "I hope that has moistened your appetite for...."

Yech. Why did he say that? Only he knows, but I bet it was because he misunderstands the phrase "to whet your appetite" using the old verb meaning "to sharpen".

English people say "wet" and "whet" as homophones (although Scots don't).
Hence the blunder.

I think it might have been a joke Mac.

Whet means to sharpen--to make eager. Moisten means, in the context I have in mind, to begin initiatiating making eager.

I am English, and I don't say "wet" and "whet" as homophones.

Many English forms of words add "tated" to the verb form, like

"We were orientated to the survey direction"

Although correct it sounds lame to my ear.

bollocks

wet bollocks?

Surprising. Most do. Likewise "Wales" and "whales", and "when" sounds like "wen" when uttered by your typical Englishman.