What are your pet peeves re English usage?

A relative of mine starts many a sentence with

"Well, you say that, but..."

and it's beginning to grate.

oh I know .... one of my daughters when little used to answer everything with 'yeah but....' for a while and the other at a similar age said 'ah but ...' constantly - we called her Arbert for a while.

I instinctively distrust any person who begins by saying, "I'll tell you the truth..." or "To be honest about it..." If one has to preface a sentence that way, I begin to suspect that this is not a normally truthful person.

Yes, I have a friend who insists on saying 'to be honest', usually when he's just saying no he doesn't want something that's been suggested - and although I've told him it sounds as though he isn't generally honest and this is a great exception, he persists. It gets on my nerves MORE THAN SOMEWHAT.

This is not a peeve but an observation; and not a totally original one, but I had forgotten about it for a while.

There are words in the negative that don't have a positive, at least not one we ever use. For example: unprecedented, untramelled, unabashed, unfettered, incalculable...........there are better examples of this but I can't think of any right now.

Can you supply more?

I withdraw "unabashed", that's wrong. Substitute "inconsolable".

McTag--

Shakespeare is a great source (graveyard?) for Lost Positives.

McT -- those aren't really good examples you gave. Every one of your examples can be used in a positive sense by removing the prefix un--. However, I've never known anyone to be gruntled, while most of us are disgruntled at one time or another. Nor do I know anyone who's ever been mayed.

For some reason I've been saying "actually" a lot in the past week. I don't know where it came from, but it's on its way back out.

Couth! ravelled. Discounting archaic or poetic use

"Sleep, the gentle sleep
That knits the ravelled sleeve of care..."

Yes I know they COULD be used but ARE they no they're not. Which I said before.

No pet peeves.

Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!

Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep,

Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,

The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,

Chief nourisher in life's feast." (2.2.32-37)

Regardless of how Willie says it, it is the most beautiful sound that I have ever heard.

Good point re: ravelled, McT. Actually 'ravelled' and 'unravelled' are words that mean the same thing whether the prefix is affixed or not. Sort of like 'flammable' and 'inflammable.' Not quite in the same category are words that can take one prefix, but not its opposite, e.g. preliminary. There is no postliminary, is there? Apropos of that, is congress the opposite of progress?

Unparallelled.

We don't talk of parallelled, do we? Hardly.

And yet the word has two sets of parallel lines in it. A kind of visual onomatawhatsit. What are the chances of that, eh?

Unkempt does not have kempt as an opposite but I believe this will come from the German kaemmen meaning to comb, so of course these words had a positive at one time, now fallen into disuse.

I must be in a good mood, I can't think of a peeve today.

onomatawhatsit

I like this one!!

not quite the same meaning - ravelled can mean frayed but it also means tangled whereas unravelling can be untangling but also coming undone (unwoven - frayed)

rav·el (rvl)
v. rav·eled also rav·elled, rav·el·ing also rav·el·ling, rav·els also rav·els
v.tr.
1. To separate the fibers or threads of (cloth, for example); unravel.
2. To clarify by separating the aspects of.
3. To tangle or complicate.
v.intr.
1. To become separated into its component threads; unravel or fray.
2. To become tangled or confused.
n.
1. A raveling.
2. A broken or discarded thread.
3. A tangle.

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[Obsolete Dutch ravelen, from ravel, loose thread.]

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that quote takes me back - I did a series of images and made an artists book about how bored and trapped I felt in a job I was doing during my degree and called it Ravelled Sleaves

There was a bit in it based on 'not waving but drowning' as well

I stand corrected, Vivien. It was Shakespeare's phrase -- knitting up the "ravelled sleeve" -- that made me think the two words both referred to threads coming apart. Good job.

Okay here's a peeve. Some authors drop French quotations about freely in their articles and I think it can be easily overdone, especially when a suitable English word or phrase can be substituted.
It can be pretentious, and can exclude some of the readership. Or maybe that's the purpose, that, or to show off.

...not even to mention Latin!

Err.....um.....certainly not you, Andrew, since you provide a translation.

:wink:

I do put in the occasional bon mot myself, n'est-ce pas, but I'm stuck for peeves today.