Skip to main content

Pet Peeves



Time to dredge out some of my pet peeves. These are words that I hear people say (usually on television or the radio) that are used incorrectly.

Enormity: This is one that grates on my nerves every time I hear it used incorrectly. It does not mean Huge, or super big, or ginormous. Enormity means evil, usually a great evil. While it is understandable that an average person might confuse enormity with something that is enormous, I have heard people who should know better (writers, reporters) who misuse this word. It would be appropriate to say “. . . the enormity of the 9/11 attacks . . .” or “. . . the enormity of Hitler’s Holocaust . . .” It would not be appropriate to say “ . . . the enormity of the Sahara Desert . . .”

Iregardless: This is not a word. You meant to say regardless.

Laid: I will confess that this one tripped me up in my younger days. If you are talking about reclining, the past tense of lie is lay. For the verb lay, meaning to set something down, the past tense is laid. So it would be proper to say: “He laid the book on the table,” or “the chicken laid an egg.” It would not be proper to say: “he laid in the bed.” Instead you should say: “he lay in the bed.”

Factoid: This is a real word, but it does not mean a small bit of information. It actually means a piece of misinformation that has been presented as fact. So don’t be saving up factoids for your trivia contest.

Forte: This one is not so much misused as it is mispronounced. There are two different words that are spelled forte. In music the word forte means loud, and is pronounced for-tay. Everyone gets that one right. The problem is the other word which means a strength or something you are good at. This one is pronounced fort.  The forte in music is an Italian word so the final e is pronounced. The other one is a French word so the final e is not. So if you hear someone say “Math is not my forte.” They should be pronouncing it fort and not fort-ay.

And while we are on the subject of pronunciation, why is it that almost no politician can pronounce “nuclear”? It usually comes out sounding like “nuke-u-lar.” Seriously, this is disturbing. There ought to be a basic test for holding public office. If you can’t pronounce nuclear, you are disqualified.

Literally: This means it actually happened. It is not to be used as a term of exaggeration or illustration. People are always saying things like “I literally died laughing.” Really? How can you say that if you are dead?

Its/it’s: The confusion here is understandable because it seems to violate the rules. “. . . its box” means the box that belongs to “it”. “It’s a red box” means “it is a red box.” Normally when you see an apostrophe followed by an “s”, it is a possessive, like “joe’s box” or “Fran’s car.” But when it comes to “its” the possessive “s” does not get an apostrophe.

“For all intensive purposes:” Yeah, that is not a thing. The correct phrase is: For all intents and purposes. The other one doesn’t make any sense.

Okay there are my pet peeves for the day. What are yours?

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an ebook through Copypastapublishing.com, Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).
Link to Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Child of the . . .

  What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school.   It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bureaucrats

  I am one of those nameless, faceless bureaucrats. Yes, that is my job. Though I actually have a name; I even am rumored to have a face. Bureau is the French word for desk, so you could say bureaucrats are “desk people.” In short, I work for the government. I sometimes have to deliver unpleasant news to a taxpayer. I sometimes have to tell them that the deed they recorded won’t work and they will have to record another one with corrections. Or we can’t process their deed until they pay their taxes. I can understand why some of these things upset people. The thing is, we don’t decide these things. It is not the bureaucrats that make the laws. The legislature writes the laws. We are required to follow the law.   If you are going to get mad at someone, get mad at the legislature. Or maybe get mad at the voters who voted the legislature in (That’s you, by the way). The same thing happens when the voters vote in a new district, or vote for a bond, or a new operating levy for an ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Telephonicus domesticus

Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone from 1877 bears about as much similarity to the modern smart phone as an abacus bears to a PC or Mac. There are just about as many leaps in technology in both cases. It’s funny how a major jump in technology happens (like the actual invention of the phone). Then there are some refinements over a few years or decades until it gets to a useful stable form. Then it stays virtually the same for many years with only minor innovations. The telephone was virtually unchanged from sometime before I was born until I was about forty. Push-buttons were replacing the rotary dial, but that was about it. (Isn’t it interesting though that when we call someone, we still call it “dialing?” I have never seen a dial on a cell phone.) Cell phones were introduced and (once they became cheap enough) they changed the way we phone each other. New advancements followed soon after, texting and then smart phones. Personal computers were also becoming commonplace and wer...
Post a Comment
Read more