What are your pet peeves re English usage?

McTag wrote:

Well phooey, friend JTT, and Pinker to me is like a red rag to a bull. A pox on your Pinker, a murrain on his verbiose hide.

I think if it can be said simply, that's how it should be said.

Gosh I've just contradicted myself.

Anyway,"hit" is better than "impact" in that case, imho.

Enheart, McT. Impact problemmed me too, but I sicked of uphilling it. Besides, I think it nuances differently than hit. But that's just me twocentsing.

I thought more about this yesterday, and my good wife came up with the same opinion, that these nouns used as verbs are a good idea if they represent a shorter way to express the idea: "impact" for "hit" does not pass this test, but "Circle the wagons!" compared with "Drive your wagons into a circle and then stop, leaving no gaps!" is an improvement.
The West would never have been won if the mavens had their way back then.

One gets used to things. I remember my revulsion when 'access' as a verb came in. Now I use it. JTT is right that of course languages evolve in just this way, but one can still be allowed a shudder - that's what this thread's for, isn't it? But the other day I saw 'signature that' instead of sign it - going too far!

One is not only allowed to shudder, but to resist. I'm quite sure Mr. Pinker, somewhere, must acknowledge the inevitability, ubiquity, and function of resistance. I'd hate to imagine that he thinks it is the strict and willful province of a handful of language mavens with nothing better to do.

The Decline of Grammar - G Nunberg
Most of my fellow linguists, in fact, would say that it is absurd even to talk about a language changing for the better or the worse. When you have the historical picture before you, and can see how Indo-European gradually slipped into Germanic, Germanic into Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon into the English of Chaucer, then Shakespeare, and then Henry James, the process of linguistic change seems as ineluctable and impersonal as continental drift.

From this Olympian point of view, not even the Norman invasion had much of an effect on the structure of the language, and all the tirades of all the grammarians since the Renaissance sound like the prattlings of landscape gardeners who hope by frantic efforts to keep Alaska from bumping into Asia.

Good one Steve.

Steve rhymes with peeve.

You win the Post of the Day

Which is my birthday, happy birthday to me.

Good one Steve.

Steve rhymes with peeve.

You win the Post of the Day

Which is my birthday, happy birthday to me.

I have heard of a name being referred to as a "Monica Rose" which comes from "monicker"