What are your pet peeves re English usage?

Sounds just like in that book by wassname, John Grisham.

AS Dave will know, many of these "big time settlemenst "come after years of investment by a law firms own resources and the amounts derived are more than half eaten up by back expenses for services, experts, testing, etc etc.

What sort of services? What sort of experts? What sorts of testing?

NYC's ex Attorney General provided a glimpse.

Testing in furtherance of their respective professions;
most ofen medical doctors, engineers, sometimes economists.



I dont believe that NYC has an Attorney General.





David

No ham, how dare you pedal this cartoonist's piffle on the hamburger.

This demonym is as fresh today as the frankfurter and the weiner. The hamburg steak that is the very gist of its existence reverberates and rumbles with the proud Germanic origins of our sacred language (notwithstanding anything the French may say to the contrary). Oh humble hamburger, who hath not etymon every day at some time before or since.

And don't get me started on aubergine from the Old German for purple prose that one might end up eating later that very evening, as a sweet.

The abhorent torent of those who's smattering of the language imagine that their tawdry attempts at wit are in any way amusing or any thing more thans a chasm of dross.

Yeah! What Miss L said. (after minor sub-edit)

"Minor"? you are too kind, McTag.

And what of a person who creates a fictitious quote?

As Oscar Wilde once remarked, "Who gives a rat's ass?"

Certainly not folks accustomed to dishonesty.

You can look this one up on Googlle


"HAMMY DOWNS"

Ok, I'll buy.

I haven't looked it up yet. Hand-me-downs?

When Star Wars was current, a small friend of my small son talked about his "life saver". (Light Sabre)

It's easily done. My cousin was puzzled by a line from a Beach Boys song, which he thought went
"Went to a dance, looking for a man..."
(Went to a dance, looking for romance..)

Correct. In todays Wash Post, Gene Weingarten (one of our own grammarial pickers -of-nit) did a column on a number of words and phrases that have gotten so fucked up that their incorrect styles have become standard spelling and pronunciation (Weingarten has coined "add homynyms" to describe these phrases.

Hammy Downs is but one.
Others include;

80 HD
Lack toast intolerant
Mind grain headaches
Self of Steam
Pedal Stool (like "don't put him up on a pedal stool")
Minus Well "we minus well just enjoy ourselves till the comet hits the earth"

Weingarten was reacting to the reliance , by "citizen journalists" upon Spellcheck and autocorrect which make a machine decision to "correct' a spelling error but the citizen journalists aren't literate enough to note that the autocorrect correction is wrong. Weingarten stated that its mostly the result of inattention. The Autocorrects have the biggest problems with foreign-based words like "prosciutto" .
He quoted an example that actually appeared in a local paper where they included a recipe.
(Guess where the word prosciutto shoulda been.

RECIPE:
Crumble the breadsticks into a mixing bowl. Cover the crumbs with warm water. Let soak two to three minutes or until soft. Drain excess water. Stir in the prostitute, provolone, pine nuts , and basil...

It derives from the scene in Amarcord where the fat peasant women are shown getting astride their bicycle seats, one after another, with quick cutting of close ups of the action and the expressions on the watcher's faces.

Ami donnas in the original Italian.

This one really goy up my goat



swat, i'm aloud to read the religuos threds even tho i'm fairy unlikely to get into it

Ms Toad: This one really goy up my goat

Quote:
back to whence they came from
---------

How come, L?

We'd have to go back, way back, back to the time when almost now extinct didacticism foamed the earth for young mammals and those alerting others to the perils of prescriptivism were fond of quoting usage, so I shall shew you too:

back to whence they came from 98,900
back whence they came from 155,000
back whence they came 588,000

Because it's unpopular.

No trippingly from the tongue for a beautiful triphthong.

Ah, yes, the corrupting influence of SpellCheck on authors and editors. I remember one science fiction book I read, one supposed to be humorous about demigods actually being real, in which someone must have hit the wrong button shortly before sending the disk with the manuscript to the printers, and several hundred examples of "deity" in the book all came out in print as "diety".
Among other kerfuffles , it had a crowd of Martians waiting with "baited breath" rather than "bated breath", The thought of all those Martians having just eaten worms was mildly entertaining, but the book was really irritating to read, kinda like the idea of reading 200 pages of OmSigDavid's bastard "fonetic" spelling.