What are your pet peeves re English usage?

Man rose to the top of the food chain
by the adroit use of logic. We shoud cultivate logic,
not adhere to and promote liberal deviations from logic,
including spoken expression.

Logically, the first dinosaur was hatched within minutes ago
and within seconds ago; its just that many billions of seconds are involved.

It is logical to say the next century will begin within minutes,
in that it surely WILL, allowing enuf minutes.

It is annoying when people say that something happened
"within minutes" or "within seconds

Man rose to the top of the food chain
by the adroit use of logic. We shoud cultivate logic,
not adhere to and promote liberal deviations from logic,
including spoken expression.

Well here's some logic for you - if it's more than sixty seconds -
they'll start using the word 'minute' - if it's more than fourteen minutes -
they'll break it down into fractions of hours -

if it's more than twenty-three hours they'll describe it in days -
if it's more than six days they'll start using the word 'week' - and on into months and years, etc...

When I say, 'It happened so fast - literally within seconds'....
the people around me who are thinking logically should be able to
ascertain that I mean in less than a minute- (or really fast).

Logically, the first dinosaur was hatched within minutes ago
and within seconds ago; its just that many billions of seconds are involved.

It is logical to say the next century will begin within minutes,
in that it surely WILL, allowing enuf minutes.

I don't find that a logical use of the words we have to express time at all.

And thinking that anyone else would - is illogical.

David wrote:

It is annoying when people say that something happened
"within minutes" or "within seconds

On second thoughts, I think it makes a minute difference...

Your post defends sloppy conceptualizing.

Quote:

Your post defends sloppy conceptualizing.

Not really - I think it indicates that I don't find it logical or productive
to pretend not to understand something when I do.

It is a radical flaw in disregard of logic
to omit the words A FEW in the indicated circumstances.

It is a radical flaw in disregard of logic
to omit the words A FEW in the indicated circumstances.

Yikes - well somehow I've made it this far- disregarding such radical flaws-
and I've never missed even ONE plane or important event when
the offending party said something like, 'We'll be boarding within
minutes- so don't go to the lady's room right now.'
It never occurred to me to say to myself, 'Hmmm- she COULD
mean next YEAR...I'll take my chances.'

You are philosophically anti-libertarian on this issue David -
I repeat - I don't get how this meshes with your overall belief system.

(I mean it's fine if this is how you want to communicate yourself -
but why inflict this level of precision and inhibition on everyone else?

And you really find this a more important issue than mandating
that doctors measure their dosages correctly?)

I missed a plane by 12 hours in Las Vegas in the 1980s,
because of another pet peeve of English expression.
American Airlines failed to designate 12 midnite or 12 noon.

Uhm . . . wouldn't midnight be 0:00?

You're too clever by half, Valter . . .

No seriously - I think I've always been intuitively anti-prescriptive in language - but I didn't know that's what I was until JTT put a name on it.

For instance, Mrs. Tan today asked why it is incorrect and not even acceptable idiomatically to say , 'A person's life is shining with opportunities'.

MA very correctly said that most people would say, 'a person's life is 'filled' with or 'fraught' with or 'full' of opportunities.

I missed a plane by 12 hours in Las Vegas in the 1980s,
because of another pet peeve of English expression.
American Airlines failed to designate 12 midnite or 12 noon.

OmSig wrote: Man rose to the top of the food chain by the adroit use of logic.

It is ironic that the jeremiads wailing about how sloppy language leads to sloppy thought are themselves hairballs of loosely-associated factoids and tangled nonsequiturs.

All the examples of verbal behavior that the complainer takes exception to for any reason are packed together in one unappealing mass and coughed up as proof of The Decline of the Language: teenage slang, sophistry, regional variations in pronunciation and diction, bureaucratic bafflegab, poor spelling and punctuation, pseudo-errors like [hopefully], badly-crafted prose, government euphemism, nonstandard grammar like [ain't], misleading advertizing, and so on (not to mention deliberate witticisms that go over the complainer's head).

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html