What are your pet peeves re English usage?

Setanta wrote:

McTag wrote:
We say "He was wearing a collar and tie" even though shirts with detachable collars went out with the Ark.

You made me think of another. Law dogs append "Esquire" to their names, so that you won't miss the fact that they've passed the bar. I have had endless harmless fun in questioning them as though i were serious, about their horses, and the necessarily difficult and expensive burden of keeping them in a modern city. Funny, most don't seem to see the humor in it.

By the same token, Set, you don't seem to see the humor when I call you a pedant. Smile

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You are such a silly little boy.

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Setanta wrote:

You are such a silly little boy.

You've either proved my point or you haven't depending on the intonation.

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Virago,
.....Things we learned traveling through the south: if in giving directions, a local tells you , "Just keep going PLUMMOAN downt that rowad,"....You got a lo-o-o-ng way to go.Also I I believe I figger'd... Embarrassed

...excuse me.. figured out the sequence of quantities. Heah 'tis'... Embarrassed

...Here it is,in ascending order...a bit...a lot..a bunch...a heap...a slew...and finally..... a wh-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-l...GOO-GOBUHDEM sumbiches!

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Of course going in the other direction it'd not so many, unless somebody knows more... you got your "lee'bit", or lil' bit.. and of course,.. your, "teeninshee" Very Happy

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I still haven't thought of that thing I forgot.

It's driving me doo-lally*.

(* Expression in English from the days of the Raj, meaning mad (Am.- crazy). Deolali was an indian sanitorium and mental hospital for serving soldiers who had gone off their chump)

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booman2 wrote:

Virago,
.....Things we learned traveling through the south: if in giving directions, a local tells you , "Just keep going PLUMMOAN downt that rowad,"....You got a lo-o-o-ng way to go.Also I I believe I figger'd... ...excuse me.. figured out the sequence of quantities. Heah 'tis'... ...Here it is,in ascending order...a bit...a lot..a bunch...a heap...a slew...and finally..... a wh-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-l...GOO-GOBUHDEM sumbiches!

Yeah, and if the conclude with the statement "You can't miss it." you got problems. Real problems.

Speaking of problems, has anybody mentioned "No problem?" I mean, if there is really a potential problem, fine, but you can say "See you in the morning." and some people are going to say "No problem." Like, should I have expected there would be?

Sorry, haven't followed the thread. Someone probably already mentioned that one.

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No, that's a good peeve. Tangentially, I like the Ozzies' use of No Worries. It's immensely heartening; especially when I had a flat tyre and got stuck in the mud in a West Australian campsite, on a Sunday morning, me, a woman of a certain age with feeble muscles and no man in tow.

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"Oh, its 'bout half mile away" means it could be any distance from one hundred yards to ten miles away, why the hell are ya askin', you'll git there when ya git there.

Many Americans "dial" a telephone, even those who have never seen a rotary phone and wouldn't know how to operate one. A "disc jockey" who many never have played a vinyl disc, warns you: "don't touch that dial!"--on your digital radio's automated control panel. Businesses still employ people to be switchboard operators, although the closest they come to operating a switch comes when they press a button on a keypad. When i worked in the state universities system in another state, we hired clerk-typists when we needed someone to do word processing on a computer. Many Americans still purchase gasoline at "service stations"--despite pumping their own gasoline and paying a bored teenager locked into a small booth.

McT, i accuse you of fostering obsession.

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Clary, have you ever heard an American respond to similar situations with "no sweat?"

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Setanta wrote:

McT, i accuse you of fostering obsession.

Guilty as charged. Embarrassed

There's certainly a lot of these quirks about.

In the west of Scotland, the first two weeks of July are known as the "Glasgow Fair Fortnight", or just the "Glasgow Fair", even though no fair has been held there for about a hundred years.

(Or even just the "Fair", as in the phrase "Whaur ye gaun 't the Ferr?)

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The fact that I haven't, Setanta, is probably a tribute to the pristine nature of American campsites rather than their jolly acceptance of responsibility.

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I ain't agonna touch that one Miss Clary . . . McT, are you Glaswegian?

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Setanta wrote:

I ain't agonna touch that one Miss Clary . . . McT, are you Glaswegian?

Close enough- I hail from fifteen miles distance of that fair city.

And another thing....every morning, we have breakfast. Who ever had to break a fast in the morning? What about all these suppers, and midnight trips to the fridge? We're able to eat all the time. And some of us carry ample evidence of this.

Damn few signs of any fasting, either before or after breakfast, eh, what?

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On advice of legal counsel, i refuse to answer on the grounds that the answer is all too obvious.

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McTag wrote:

(Or even just the "Fair", as in the phrase "Whaur ye gaun 't the Ferr?)

I thought some more about this and realised something....JTT will like this:

The west of Scotland dialect has adopted a useful word which has not existed in English for some centuries...namely, a plural form of the pronoun "you".

examples:

"Whaur ye gaun?" -Where are you (singular, pronounced "yi") going?

"Whaur yis gaun?" -Where are you (and your chums or adherents here gathered) going?

Very useful, that.

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A speech investigator could make much of "y'all." Although i have heard it, it is rarely used to replace "thou," but does in fact refer to the second person plural. The variances of the pronunciation and even of form, are great. In some parts of Kentucky and southern Illinois (at the extreme northern range of "the South") local people often say "you-uns"--"Are you-uns goin', too?" In the coastal Carolinas, there is a pronunciation which is hard to render in a word, but sounds something like "yo-wall." The oft referred-to "Southern drawl" does not necessarily obtain universally in the American South--in Southside Virginia, the local native accent is a direct descendant of Elizabethan English, and there is clipped, abrupt sound to many pronunciations.

I dislike a bland uniformity, i'm glad that there are so many colors of speech in English.

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Thanks a Bunch Roger,
I had actually meant to include, 'Yuh cain't misit", I would usually mumble under my breath, 'wanna' bet?" Razz

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Breakfast is the same in many languages. In Latin disjejunare = to break one's fast. In old French the sloppy surrender monkeys reduced it to dîner, ate it later and later, and déjeuner replaced it for breakfast. That slipped forward in time so that we now have petit déjeuner. So all 3 meals are fast-breakers for the Frogs.

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Clary,
....Is "off their chump", the predeccesor to,"off their food bag"?
.....Setanta,
.....I'll bet you probably do a slow burn when someone says "just ONE second". Evil or Very Mad

...when I'm in a good mood, I'll say something like "go ahead and take more time." If I'm feeling a bit more devilish, I'll proclaim, "ONE THOUSAND ONE".

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What are your pet peeves re English usage?

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