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When people say:

* "I could care less," when they really mean "I COULDN'T care less"

* "Irregardless," when they mean "regardless"

* "Nucular" instead of "nuclear"

* "Bob wire" instead of "barbed wire"

* "Klu Klux Klan" instead of "Ku Klux Klan"

* "verbage" instead of "verbiage"

I never make any of these mistakes, for I am the Burgomaster, and I am infallible.   :teddyr:

Thank you Burgomaster! Great topic ... I hate when people say ...

* Wooder instead of water

* Nucular instead of nuclear

* Idear instead of idea

I noticed on the internet over the years that lots of people say (type):

* peice instead of piece

* Speilberg instead of Spielberg

* weiner instead of wiener (most common)

* wrongfully "they're" instead of their

Having lived in the Greater Boston area for my entire life, I hear "idear" quite a bit.  I also hear:

* Watah (instead of water)

* Fawty (instead of forty)

* Yee-ahs (instead of years)

I am very conscious of my accent and try to disguise it when I travel out of state, but it often sneaks through.

I don't mind accents so much. What I hate is people who opt for a fancier word to sound smarter and end up misusing it.

"Surgery" in place of "operation" or "procedure" is the one that bugs me the most because it has become so common that even the surgeons themselves are doing it. I just cringe when I hear about somebody who's had "three surgeries." Surgery is the type of medicine being practiced, while a surgical procedure is more properly called....a surgical procedure. Or better still, if you don't actually work in a hospital, just call it an operation. That's what laymen called it for years until somebody thought "surgery" sounded smarter, then proceeded to misuse it in the dopiest way imaginable. To get some idea how ridiculous it sounds, imagine a porn movie that features three buggeries. It's bad English.

In written language, I get annoyed with people who can't keep there, their and they're straight. Or its and it's. I've edited work by professional writers who consistently mess that up.

I get annoyed at people who say "butt naked" when they mean "buck naked."

And people, including my own wife, who call a certain spotted jungle cat a "jagwire." How does one get that from J-A-G-U-A-R? I don't even mind when some Britons call it a "jag-you-are" because it at least fits the spelling. "Jagwire" most likely just comes from mishearing it as a kid and never figuring it out.

Which brings me to perhaps the most offensive misuse. And what makes it so offensive is that it's such a little thing. Two words, three letters each, spelled nothing alike and technically pronounced differently. Both are completely unrelated by definition, and both are among the most commonly used words in the English language. I'm talking about people who write "are" when they mean "our." Good lord, did these people teach themselves to read and write? Did they manage to do it without ever looking at a book? There's just no excuse for that.

Following the NE accents already posted, I hate having the name Mark in my area which is pronounced  "Mahk".

I was watching a review of a video game the other day and the reviewer was saying "debut", but pronouncing it "day-boo".  I got a good chuckle out of it  :teddyr:

One I'm noticing more and more in written form is using "women" as a singular instead of "woman." I've even been seeing this one on reputable websites, so it's not just in informal settings. This one baffles me. I've never seen "men" used as a singular, and the rule is exactly the same.

Another that annoys me more and more is using "everyday" as anything but an adjective, which is what the word is. "Lower Prices Everyday!" "Toyota Everyday." Urgh. Advertisers get paid enough to be able to afford a competent proofreader.

In spoken usage, I usually don't get too peeved, and then never because of accents. I love different dialects and generally try to play Professor Henry Higgins and guess where someone is from based on their dialect. That said, I do dislike the "I could care less" nonsense that Burgo started with. I also dislike using profanity, mostly because it leads to very lazy thought patterns, like turning "F**k" into every part of speech and using it both positively and negatively, often in the same sentence. It can be funny, and I'm not offended by it, but more often than not it's just lazy and stupid.

"Addicting" instead of Addictive

My lovely wife says "Wheel Barrel" rather than "wheelbarrow".  THats makes me cringe.

A thing that I heard the first time since I moved here is the past tense of "to buy" is "Boughten" that drives me nuts.

"I needed to buy milk, but Charlie had already boughten it."
-Ed

That's when you need to start singing "My Name is Mahk, and Thanks a Lot." :teddyr:

I love it when people get "massage" and "message" mixed up!  I live very close to a "Message Therapy" place, and a girl at work often sends us e-mails about "error massages".

My Mom was about as country as you can get

thang = thing

winders = windows

Get a drank of water   ..... well you get the point

That reminds me of one that is not so much annoying as it is amusing in a dopey sort of way. People who extend their use of "f**k" into all of their other profanity. This could just be out of habit; some people tend to use it endlessly. But I suspect that on some level, they think it adds emphasis. The best example of this, and it's one I'm sometimes guilty of, is "For f**k's sake!"

What does that even mean? I have no idea, but I've been hearing it, and sometimes saying it, since I was a kid. Maybe that's where it starts, when we're kids and the dreaded "F-word" is the strongest bad word out there. Or at least it was when most of us were kids. Takes the cursing up a notch, but makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

I just about fell out of my chair laughing when Trailer Park Boys took this to the ultimate. Every once in a while, Ricky, the stereotypical dumbass who overuses the F-word, will stumble upon a shocking situation and declare "Oh...my...f**k!"

Cracks me up. It's so true.

Some friends and I are doing of cover of Science Fiction Double Feature (from Rocky Horror), when we were trying to decide who sings it I noticed when my friend sang the line "Dana Andrews said prunes, gave him the runes" he said Daner Andrews.  It p**sed my other friend off.

Turns out I sang it the same way, so we just flipped a coin. :lookingup:

I have an uncle who grew up in Iowa and he says "warsh" instead of "wash."

I have only one and I hate to even mention it as im terrible at spelling and grammar  but here it goes.   :smile:


Supposebly instead of supposedly.

I apologize to all who say that.   :teddyr:

My dad grew up in an extremely rural part of southern Ontario, and he says it the same way. It would not be uncommon to hear him say something like "Sairdy morning, we should go warsh the car, then put it in the gradge."

On second thought, he never would have said that. Cars weren't allowed in our garage. They'd mess it up. :lookingup:

I don't know if this fits here but I hate the term "My baby's daddy". 

Funny, I usually just hear some mush-mouth Ebonics version of "He my baby daddy". And that is usually at a very high decibel.

I've seen "for all intensive purposes" rather than "for all intents and purposes." That one drives me batty.

Once a friend send he was going to "maul" something over. I looked at him and asked, "do you mean mull?"

I have a friend who worked with a guy who used all knds of stuff:
Tarmac (like at the airport)- Tar Mat "The airplant is on the Tar Mat"
Illregardless-  "Bob will be there illregardless"

-Ed

Has to be close to 20 years ago, a friend of mine (a guy who used to say "for f**k's sake" a lot, come to think of it) wanted me to look at a letter he wrote to his girlfriend. It was full of all the choice BS guys of 18 or 19 like to tell their girlfriends :lookingup: but the one really memorable thing was near the beginning, where he wrote "please bare with me."  I said "are you asking her to get naked?"

I explained his homophone problem, and we both laughed our butts off.

I'm afraid I do that all that time.  Its not that I don't know the difference, its just that their so easy to confuse when your typing fast. 

Message board errors that annoy me the most:

"Grammer" for grammar
"Rediculous" for ridiculous
"Ludacris" for ludicrous

And this one I see all the time on sports message boards, and I just can't understand it: people always get "dominant" and "dominate" backwards, as in "We will dominant UK when we play them" or "UL looked pretty dominate last night." 

I can't get enough of the baby daddies!  I've actually seen "Relationship: Baby Daddy" written for an emergency contact at work.

One that I constantly have to correct on student papers is
"defiantly" instead of "defnitely".  As in, "I enjoyed this book and would defiantly recommend it to other students."

Lately, what annoys me is all the permutations of "per se" that crop up on the net.  Add to that "walla" for "voila".

Every time I hear "have got" I want to launch into a grammar lecture.

I just read a post yesterday on another board about the correct "presher" to use when heat pressing vinyl onto polyester.

Speaking of grammer, I used to have a boss who constantly misused words. In his case, he used to talk about "grammarical" errors. And he once talked about someone being "cohorsed" into doing something. And we kind of half giggled and half cringed when he talked about "kiking" a cheque. Not only did he get it wrong, he made it anti-semitic in the process.

And what he did to names. Yikes. Any unfamiliar name, when he spoke it, would be automatically replaced by a similar one he was more familiar with. Needless to say, in a building full of people paid to get names and words right, he was the butt of many jokes. He was the business manager, by the way - the one guy who had no direct involvement in putting out a paper.

The one thing that drives me up the wall and over it is the annoying habit some South African newsreaders and DJs on the radio here have of ENUNCiatinG almOST evERY lettER iN A WoRD. Worse, they adopt a pseudo-British or American accent to make themselves sound important and posh. Note to them: the only people who do good British and American accents are people from those countries.

The worst of all happened to me a few years ago: I had a client here who spoke to me in a broad American accent and I asked him:

"So what part of the States are you from?"
"Nahhh, maaannnnn, Ah'm nart from there."
"Where are you from then?"
"Johannesburg, mannnn....."

 :question:

Spokane is supposed to be famous for having people who get down right irritated when they hear gross mispronunciations of anything Washington related. 

Like saying Spokane with a long a (SPO-CAIN instead of SPO-CAN).

We had an assembly when I was in high school where the guest speaker said, "Warshington."  The entire gym yelled WASHINGTON!

Or pronouncing Puget Sound with a hard g (PUG instead of PYOOJ). 

Or mispronouncing Gonzaga.  I hear a bunch say GON-ZUH-GUH.  Ugh... It's GON-ZA-GUH. 

As for me, I can't stand it when I hear the word chimera pronounced like "chicken" instead of "chemical."  I don't know why, but it drive me freakin' nuts. 

You shouldn't try to disguise that, man.  It's a great accent.  Sadly, a decaying one, like many accents in the US. 

Probably the misuse of a word that bugs me the most is how people here in the mid west use ignorant.  They've basically converted it into a slight variant on the word "rude" or "uncouth".  Like, "that was so ignorant, the way that man treated me".  I heard it occasionally that way very occasionally back in Michigan, but here in Missouri it comes up aaaallllll the time. 

A funny local one (mostly) I hear sometimes is Missouri VS Missoureh.  You can tell you're in the south in Missouri when the EE becomes EH.  Or it's just an older person talking.  My stepfather, who grew up in St. Louis city, says BOTH depending on context.

Also, online, people typing rouge instead of rogue.  I do find that a little irritating sometimes. 

Another word that's common (and very overused) in the Greater Boston Area is "wicked."  It's used in sentences and phrases to mean "extremely."  Examples:

* That car is wicked cool.

* He's a wicked good baseball player.

* We had a wicked good time at the party.

There's a commercial on local TV now that makes fun of Boston slang.  It's two guys asking each other questions and giving "Boston style" answers.  One of the questions is "What's the best musical ever?"  And the answer is "Wicked."

I hate that too.  I guess it makes people feel smart to say other people are dumb.  Another is "diversity" used to replace any word that has roughly the same meaning, no matter how odd it sounds.

I once knew a girl from Missouri who said "warsh".  That really bugged me.  Why stick an "r" in the middle of a perfectly good word like wash?

A few years ago, there was some politically correct effort to replace "him" with "her".  It was the most distracting thing ever, and always made me chuckle.  Especially funny was the way this replacement was never, ever used when writing about anything negative. 

What I hate is the newsreaders who speak in their normal accent, but slip into a different one every time they read the name of some foreign place. Comes off as very pretentious. I imagine they think they're pronouncing it correctly by saying it the way the locals do, but it's just awkward. They're speaking English and using the proper accent for that, it's all right not to roll the Rs and put emphasis on different syllables.

I don't object when somebody who grew up speaking a different language pronounces my name or the name of my town a little differently, and that's when he's speaking my language. It's his accent. If I speak his name, my accent is going to come through, and there's nothing wrong with that. What gets me is these newsreaders not only come off sounding a little superior to all us rubes who don't affect different accents for various words, but they also seem kind of patronizing toward the speakers of the other languages. Like "it's OK if you mispronounce my name, because you're a foreigner, but I can speak yours as well as you do." What would seem to support this is that the practice never seems to be applied to European countries. It's always names from Central America or the Middle East - places perceived as backward.

Just comes across as really snooty in my opinion.

My dad says "tagar" instead of "tiger". 

We get that a lot in South Texas also, except I find it funny most of the time when people just can't figure out how to pronounce Spanish town names. Add to that Texans who murder the pronunciations for years, and you get some weird situations. For example, there's a town near me named Refugio. Correctly pronounced, that would be re-FOO-hee-oh. In the area, however, people have mispronounced it so long that we call the place re-FYOO-ree-oh. I don't know how many times I've heard people not from the area complain that they can't find Refury-o on the map. Or they try to pronounce it as re-FUG-ee-oh.

And AndyC, we get the accent switches here quite often as well, but kind of in reverse: We have several Hispanic newsreaders who speak with a standard broadcaster's accent until they say their name, at which time they start rolling the r's and seemingly going out of their way to "prove" their Hispanicity. I can see why you'd find the affecting of an accent as pretentious; I find these people annoying, and they are actually just reverting to their original accent.

And another peeve: People who constantly type "quite" for "quiet."

How about technical terms?

There something we do with horses called "longeing".  It is pretty basic, really.  The word is correctly spelled "longe" as (like many words involved in horse training) it comes from the French for "long"  (it involves using a *long* line or rope) and has been anglicised into being pronounced "lunj" and "lunj-ing".  It is more often than not mis-spelled as "lounge".  Now: how silly is that?  "I need to lounge my horse" :question:  They write it "lounge" and pronounce it "lunj" : why can't they spell it correctly if they are going to pronounce it differently than the way it is spelled *anyway*?  Drives me crazy!

I can't believe we've gotten this far without going into corporate speak.

I worked a couple of years for a guy who was a strong believer in "team." Not teams, not teamwork, not working as a team, but "team" as some sort of philosphy. I immediately pegged the guy as a self-serving jerk who could not be trusted, and the following two years pretty much confirmed it.

And of course there's "impact" as something with more pizazz than "effect." And business types took that one and ran with it. In place of "affected" we got "impacted" - something that happens to wisdom teeth and feces. And then there's the cringeworthy "impactful." Impactful? How does that sound better than "effective?"

That one has to be the worst!

I find this immensely annoying. It's the most stupid mistake ever. People who are not able to work out why this doesn't make sense actually offend me.

I also can't stand could of/would of/should of in place of could've/would've/should've.

I view language as akin to music.

When you're talking, you don't need to be grammatically perfect. Far from it. If you make sense to the people you're talking to, mission accomplished!

However, I think that everybody has a sense of grammatically correct language. Not to get too esoteric, but I think grammatical rules are important. No matter what the content, we all have a higher sense of language than we admit to. We may not want to admit to be language snobs, but all of us can hear when somebody is making a language error. It's like listening to somebody sing a wrong note. You may not be able to pinpoint exactly what they did wrong, but you can certainly hear it.

I'll tell you the thing that annoys me more than anything else. It's the calling out of supposedly "large" words. I got called out for using the word "conducive." Ladies and gentleman, it's your language, why not learn to use it?

I get a hell of a lot of that at work ~ quotes like "..at the end of the day..", "playing fields must be levelled..", "...previously disadvantaged communities...." and on and on, ad nauseaum. What also makes me angry is these idiots who use Latin phrases to end off their sentences.  :wink:

When people say "ite?" instead of "all right?".
Substituting an 's' in a plural word with a 'z'.  Like, "I got skillz".
And oh, the sweet irony when someone says "ignant" instead of "ignorant".  Or is it intentional?

I once used a long word when I was in high school ~ a prefect who was within hearing distance remarked "That word's longer than marmalade."  :teddyr:

It's not really a mistake (well, not really anymore) it's the slippery linguistic alteration of a phrase into an idiom.  Basically, could has one less syllable and is easier to say than couldn't, so it was substituted in.  It's not that everyone who says it this way doesn't actually know the difference.  I can still totally understand why it bugs people.

One phrase I actually like that makes no sense: "Fine as a hair on a frog's back" and variants.

I hate that. People who think you're putting on airs when you simply have a healthy vocabulary. My wife gets that from her family, and what frustrates her is when the word is not that unusual. Her mom once gave her a hard time for calling somebody "sanctimonious." Not only is that a fairly common word, but there really isn't a better way to get that precise meaning across. To dumb down "sanctimonious," you'd almost have to describe the quality. Even saying "holier than thou" doesn't quite convey the same meaning.

And yet, nobody gets called out for using words like "impacted" and "surgeries" - improper words that people do use to sound smart.

Decimate.  It means to take or destroy one in ten of; to punish every tenth man by death.  It is most often used to as equivalent to destroy or annihilate (to blot out of existence; to reduce to nothing).  That's a long way from one-in-ten.

You know, I have to agree, I love playing with my words for fun... For example, sometimes instead of saying "I'm not ready" I'll say "I am disenreadyated" or something equlally stupid. 
-Ed

That's an important distinction for me. I like it when people are colourful in their use of language, and I love accents (unless I'm calling a tech support line). I can appreciate regional quirks, and I can overlook errors by people who learned English as a second language. It's the people who have no excuse, who mess up the language and aren't kidding about it.

I think once you master working with the language, it's OK to play with it. What really bug me are ignorance and pretense and laziness.

Speaking of accents, I work tech support for scientists.   Once I let my mind wander as the customer asked a question and I replied "Yep, that. dog'll hunt"

Oh dear...My daughter had a toy named Jacques Peacock once, and my wife mispronounced it Jah-Kezz, and i laughed at her for it. Now I'm watching the OSU vs Oregon football game, and theres a player named Jaquizz. So not only did someone misprounounce it, someone else spelled it phonetically. 

don't forget, "wicked"

* Cah (for car)

* Rotary (roundabout everywhere else, mostly particular to the NE)

* Tonic (instead of cola)

"Open minded".  Sets my teeth on edge when people use this to indicate they accept anything and everything they hear/read at face value, all equal, without question or examination - and then present this 'open-mindedness' as an indication of their ethical and intellectual superiority.   :lookingup:

Amen, sister. I don't really believe in "open mindedness" or "closed mindedness," at least not the way it is used lately. "Open-minded" people (and, hey, who doesn't consider themselves to be reasonably open minded?) generally use the terms as a politically correct way to call someone they disagree with an idiot (because only an idiot could be as closed minded as fill in the blank). In other words, if I don't agree with your opinion, it is because I am open minded (and therefore smart), while you are closed minded (and therefore an idiot). If you only thought clearly (like, of course, I do), then you would share my opinion, since it is the only valid one.

I don't call myself open minded, but in practice I am much more willing to listen to others' opinions and accept the differences between us without trying to force my opinion on them than many I've met who claim to be very open minded. I'm also willing to call an idiot an idiot (at least to myself).

My first boss in the newspaper business was one of those old-fashioned owner-editors who believed he was crusading for truth and justice in the community while he was really just on a power trip and making a comfortable living at it (until enough subscribers and advertisers deserted him). The guy wielded his paper like a club. And he always used to refer to "thoughtful people" in his editorials. It was always what thoughtful people believe, what thoughtful people do, what thoughtful people know, etc. And it didn't take a terribly thoughtful person to see that "thoughtful people" were just people who agreed with him. What really bugged me was that it's phrased positively enough to be not too offensive on the surface, until you ask "What am I if I don't agree?"

As for myself, I do use the term "open minded" but not in that broad "it's all good" sense. To me, open mindedness is just a willingness to consider possibilities and points of view, rather than rejecting them out of hand. Your mind might already be made up, but you're not beyond persuasion. I agree it has nothing to do with unconditional acceptance and approval.

The people where I live currently all say buzz instead of bus. It sounds bloody awful!

Yup.  Nothing better than going to Fenway Park and getting a "Hawt dawg and a tonic" (or a "beah") while watching the Red Sawx play "a wicked good game of baseball."  The only bummer is paying $40 to pahk the cah.

One mispronunciation of a word that never fails to annoy me is "libary" in place of "library." I may be sensitive because I actually work in a library, but there's just no good reason to mispronounce the word other than ignorance of its actual pronunciation.

I don't know if it's been mentioned already, but when people say "kinny garden" or "kiddy garden" for Kindergarten, I have to resist the urge to choke them.

Growing up in Mennonite country, I heard a few good mispronunciations. In their defence, the really conservative Mennonites speak German amongst themselves, they don't have radios or televisions, and they keep to themselves as much as possible. Basically, most of what they know either came from reading or from other Mennonites. When they find an unfamiliar word, they sound it out as best they can. The results are kind of interesting when you deal with them as an outsider.

Among other things, I've heard "galaxy" pronounced "ga-LACK-see" and "Croatia" pronounced "Crow-ah-TIE-ah." Both of those were pretty funny after my initial confusion.

The one that annoyed me at times was when they consistently mispronounced the name of the local township. "Woolwich" is named after a place in England, and the second "W" is silent. It's "Wool-itch." Mennonites pronounce it "Wool-witch." When it's one of the Old Orders, I pretty much accept it as part of the accent. But it bugged me when my mainstream Mennonite friends - who went to public school, spoke English primarily, watched TV and dressed like everybody else - also mispronounced it. I got really annoyed with my best friend one time when we were about 25. We were talking about some other name with a silent letter, and I compared it to people saying "Wool-witch." And he says "But it is pronounced Wool-witch."

I must have stared at him for a full 30 seconds before responding to that. Just about cuffed him in the back of the head. :teddyr: But he ended up marrying somebody from Liverpool a few years later, and she educated him on British names.