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

Second Wind

  You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running.   In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...
1 comment
Read more

The Outsider

  I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...
1 comment
Read more

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