English language pet peeves

[Muzer]

Post the misuses of the English language which you hate the most.

Mine are probably:

Misplaced apostrophes (which my phone just tried to autocorrect to "catastrophes" - this shows you how much people care.)

Americanised spellings in British English

Confusion between ie and eg - ie means "that is", eg means "for example" - it isn't hard to remember!

Confusion between of and have (correct: could've, could have. Incorrect: could of)

Things that should be two words being spelt as one - shutdown the noun being used as a verb; alot; everyday the adjective being used as an adverb and plenty more like this.

[Tsamsiyu92]

No set pronounciation rules, meaning that the same letter might be pronounced differently from word to word. (e.g. "-ough", need I say more?"

[Eyamsiyu]

I hate it when people pronounce things incorrectly.  For example, people in this area tend to pronounce "EAT" as "EHT."  The college I go to is "PemBROKE," and people say "PemBROOK."  It irks the crap out of me.

[Muzer]

Did you mean "ate" as "eht"?

Stuff like that wouldn't bother me IF we had spelling reforms - but we don't, so it only serves to confuse people learning English, so it does irritate me a little.

[Eyamsiyu]

Did you mean "ate" as "eht"?

No, I truly mean what I said.  "eat" as "eht."

Another one: "wash" as "warsh"

[Muzer]

Wow - that IS weird. I haven't heard THAT before.

[Eyamsiyu]

Wow - that IS weird. I haven't heard THAT before.

Well, I live in an area that is populated by the Lumbee tribe.  And they have very weird ways of pronouncing things.

[Kìte'eyä Aungia]

My experience studying linguistics has actually managed to knock the pedantry right out of me. Even as far back as the first lecture on the first day you're smacked in the face and told to stop being such a goddamn pedantic prescriptivist.

[kewnya txamew'itan]

Confusion between ie and eg - ie means "that is", eg means "for example" - it isn't hard to remember!

I never new this one, I'll try to follow it.

Another one: "wash" as "warsh"

That doesn't sound at all odd to me. Seems to me to be a standard conversion from [ɒ] to [ɑ] which is common to almost all American accents. From there it's just acquired a rhotic r for no very good reason, possibly folk phonology.

['Oma Tirea]

Americanized spellings in British English

My main pet peeves with English are much ado about how it has been spelled, and that there hasn't been much respelling going on, not even historically.  Some examples:

• In words like "renaissance" and "fabulous," digraphs are reduced vowels.  Doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense
• Sometimes "ou," which was originally meant to be a long u (IPA: {u}, not {ju}), became lax and was never respelled.  Examples: could ({ʊ}/{ɤ}) country, rough {ʌ}
• "gh" and that notoriously ugly "ough" combination is still ambiguous in words like "light," "tough," "laugh" and "cough."  Better respellings of these words (some of which you may have seen) are: "lite," "tuff," "laff" and "coff."
• Why hasn't voiced "th" been historically respelled from the "then-thyn" split?  Small words like "the," "this," and "that" could have easily become "dhe," dhis," and "dhat."  Other orthographies use this combination for the {ð} phoneme, and "th" for {θ} only.
  
• Words like "use" and "close" can be said two ways with a different meaning.  Why is it we haven't learned to respell the active (verbal) form of these words into "uze" and "cloze"?
• Too many dialect-independent mergers (e.g. the not-knot merger), homophones, homographs, etc.  It's a downright mess there!
• ...and don't even get me started with the complexity of even trying to see the regulations of this stuff called the English language (starting with that silent e at the end...)

Aside from that, I've always wondered why there's no gender-inspecific word for he/she.  Na'vi has po, and I'm sure it exists in other languages, but not English, which can really be a bit of a throw-off


...and I probably missed something

[kewnya txamew'itan]

Ma sxkxawng, the reason that renaissance is spelt that way might be due to the English pronunciation which stresses the second syllable with the first being a schwa, the second is then [ej]. As for your  others, I can't think of any reasonable explanation and I too wish English had <dh>

['Oma Tirea]

Ma sxkxawng, the reason that renaissance is spelt that way might be due to the English pronunciation which stresses the second syllable with the first being a schwa, the second is then [ej].

My thought was that it was an old French loanword, where the digraph "ai" is used to indicate a short {ɛ}, and somehow became a reduced vowel without respelling....

[Muzer]

There are two ways to pronounce "renaissance" - one with the stress on the first syllable, and one with it on the second. If you put it on the second, all makes sense, as that vowel turns into a dipthong (the way I happen to pronounce it)

[kewnya txamew'itan]

Ma sxkxawng, the reason that renaissance is spelt that way might be due to the English pronunciation which stresses the second syllable with the first being a schwa, the second is then [ej].

My thought was that it was an old French loanword, where the digraph "ai" is used to indicate a short {ɛ}, and somehow became a reduced vowel without respelling....

That would make sense for the original common spelling but I dare say that its persistence is partly due to the predominant pronunciation that I've experienced in England with the second syllable stressed.

[Nyx]

It hurts me when people mess up these:

- you're vs your
- they're vs their vs there
- hear vs here
- it's vs its
- effect vs affect
- further vs farther
- then vs than

It's so simple I'm not even going to bother typing out the differences.

[kewnya txamew'itan]

- further vs farther

This one is debatable. According to wiktionary most (and in my experience almost all) usage guides say that there isn't a real distinction with only a few making one and those usage guides often disagreeing on said distinction (some of them say farther is for distance and further for degree or time whilst the OED (and presumably others as well) states that farther should be the comparative whilst further is the non-comparative form e.g. he ran further and he ran farther than John (did)).

[Kä'eng]

The kind of mistake that really ticks me off is phrases changed to sound like they have the opposite meaning of what was intended, e.g. regardless -> *irregardless, couldn't care less -> *could care less.

[Muzer]

Oh yeah, how could I forget those? (Nyx's post, and Kä'eng's)


The other irritating one is when ignorant Americans change "can't be arsed" into "can't be asked" - inverting the meaning a little ("I want to do it so much, you don't even have chance to ask me before I'm off doing it" could be one interpretation of "can't be asked").

[Nyx]

- further vs farther

This one is debatable. According to wiktionary most (and in my experience almost all) usage guides say that there isn't a real distinction with only a few making one and those usage guides often disagreeing on said distinction (some of them say farther is for distance and further for degree or time whilst the OED (and presumably others as well) states that farther should be the comparative whilst further is the non-comparative form e.g. he ran further and he ran farther than John (did)).

Ah, that explains the confusion I've been seeing around that. Thanks

[kewnya txamew'itan]

The other irritating one is when ignorant Americans change "can't be arsed" into "can't be asked" - inverting the meaning a little ("I want to do it so much, you don't even have chance to ask me before I'm off doing it" could be one interpretation of "can't be asked").

Ehhh... That's not what "can't be arsed" means. It's (at least in my experience) a slightly more vulgar expression for "can't be bothered", the opposite of the meaning you gave.