Please state in which country your phrase tends to be used, what the phrase is, and what it should be.
Example:
In America, recently came across “back-petal”, instead of back-pedal. Also, still hearing “for all intensive purposes” instead of “for all intents and purposes”.
People that think “y” in online gaming means “yeah” instead of “why”.
This entire thread is /c/badlinguistics
I really wish there were enough lemmings to maintain ling or grammar communities here. It’s one thing I really miss from reddit
I agree, and I love your username.
I think this thread is evidence that there are enough people for this. The problem for niche communities on Lemmy is still the front page feed algorithms, none of which appear to properly surface interesting posts from your less active subscribed communities. This is not a criticism on Lemmy’s developers, who I am very thankful to for developing it. I think it must just be a difficult algorithm to get right.
Algorithm stuff aside, I’m not sure this thread is a good indication of how much can be contributed to linguistics or grammar comms. Plenty of people are in here airing pet peeves, but that’s never a good indication of actual interest in language-- like how r/grammar doesn’t allow pet peeve threads or simple prescriptivism without also providing a discussion of the grammar mechanics. Low effort stuff used to get removed with a recommendation to try subs like r/grammarnazi, but that community (now it’s private so I can’t check details, but I remember it being kind of dead) never had much content specifically because people who just want to make pet peeve threads don’t have any interest in actual discussion.
There already are a couple comms that don’t get much traffic, so maybe if the algo were better we’d see an uptick of the linguistic minded lemmings over there, but it’s a pretty niche interest so I’m not holding out much hope. Looks like the most “active” with a couple posts a month is [email protected] (anything more grammar focused looks dead).
That’s a possibility too, but we’ll never know for sure until the front page subscribed algorithms are improved.
I hear the algo’s a big problem with loops and mastodon (?) also, but I don’t really do the tiktok or twitter style SMS so I’m not very familiar. With all the shit going on with the oligarchs and right wing world governments these days, it’ll be interesting to see if the fediverse can sustain itself.
I don’t know anything about loops but I use mastodon fairly regularly. Mastodon only has like two basic algorithms: your main feed shows the individual posts of everyone you follow or which contain hashtags you follow. Then there’s another page that will also show you the top posts of the day - I believe that goes by the posts which received the most “boosts” although I’ve seen some people say that it may take into account the number of “favorites” the post receives. It’s a fairly different concept from Lemmy.
I’m hoping that the Fediverse thrives, even at a smaller scale. I’m so done with major corporate social media. Speaking of which, tomorrow is being called a day to switch from the corporate ones to the independent ones, like Reddit -> Lemmy, Twitter -> Mastodon, Instagram -> Pixelfed, etc.
Aisle. As much as I would love to take a boat to the breakfast food isle (a.k.a. island), I’m pretty sure that I need to look in the breakfast aisle at the grocery store.
“Touch base”
No, you cannot touch base with me; I’m not into that. Go touch your own base, base toucher.
The idiom relies on a person being familiar with baseball, but even then it makes very little contextual sense.
It makes total sense if you are familiar with baseball.
Touching base is something you need to be sure you do. Not only while running bases, but also when tagging up after a dead ball or a caught fly.
It happens regularly and, therefore, it is generally nonchalant. But it must be done; it must be remembered and kept up with.
No, it makes little literal sense. How much sense it makes contextually depends on the usage.
All your base are touched by us.
Good touch or bad touch?
Oh, baseball! That makes much more sense.
For some reason I had assumed it came from tabletop gaming, where your model’s base much touch another player’s base in order to whisper to them
Lol, tabletop gaming is far too niche to be the progenitor of so widespread a term
“flush it out” instead of “flesh it out” when designing a plan
That one drives me nuts too. “Coming down the pike” too. I’m not even sure that one is incorrect, I just dislike how overused and generic it sounds in the office
I think coming down the pike might be animal cruelty
Please explain
A pike is a type of fish and I was making a crude joke.
Sometimes you just need to send some dogs into that meeting and shoot the first plan that comes flying out.
I, too, like to abort all my ideas onto the page…
“Let’s flush out this design.”
“You got it!” [Slowly readies a grenade.]
Using loose instead of lose.
I’m losing friends for loosing dogs on useless losers’ loose use of lose and loose
People capitalizing Random Words for emphasis, as if they’re Proper Nouns.
Also getting ‘a’ vs ‘an’ wrong. It follows pronunciation, not spelling; so it’s “a European” and “an honor”.
Oh my goodness, someone pointed this out on Tumblr years ago, but it desperately needs repeating:
Dear English Language Fanfic Writers,
-
Wanton: an unrestrained desire, usually of a sexually nature.
-
Wonton: a type of dumpling found in Chinese and East Asian cuisine.
-
People’s names. I think it’s dismissive/disrespectful to mispronounce someone’s name.
I have a rare last name (for the US anywa), and the pronunciations I get are amazing. My favorite was Mr. Tubbo, at the bank. I’ve also gotten Tugboat. My name has no G in it.
Whenever I go somewhere where I know I’ll have to spell my name (like the bank, gov offices, et cetera) I always offer them a dollar if they can pronounce it. I’ve had to pay a dollar one time in 30 years, and that’s only because she was involved with a French company. It never really bothers me when people can’t pronounce it. What bugs me is when I tell them how to say it and they still can’t get it. It’s spelled all fucked up and French, but it’s only 2 syllables, and a very, very simple name to pronounce. But they can’t get the spelling out of their head, and fuck it up every time
Thibault? That’s the first 2 syllable French name that comes to mind that I could see people mangling to Tubbo or Tugboat
You can’t really blame people for mispronouncing a rare or foreign name. It would only be a problem if it was done repeatedly with the intent to offend.
I do get irritated when they have 2 different pronunciations of a name that’s spelled the same. And they assume the less common one.
Absolutely. It’s not fair to blame people for honest mistakes. If I implied it was, then that was a mistake!
I really hate it when us media uses the word “ouster”.
For example:
“Vail Resorts shareholder calls for ouster of CEO, CFO and Rob Katz”
They mean to use the word here as “removal”, but “oust” is also a verb and “ouster” would be “one who ousts”.
So, calls for the ouster of the CEO/CFO to do what?
They could just use “ousting”
Yup!
What I really hate is when people don’t capitalize the abbreviation US, because it makes me think they’re saying “us” as in “we,” or “oui” as the French like to say.
😀
I gotta correct myself when I do it because I’m not from the US so us and US aren’t even the same people.
OK, since you mentioned the media, putting “gate” after any government scandal. Nixon’s scandal was involving the Watergate Office Building.
I think the ouster is supposed to be the event that results in ousting. But it’s so redundant it’s not funny. Removal would be for much better.
In the USA and other English-speaking countries: weary =/= wary.
For example, I’ll see someone write something like: “I am weary of the campfire because it is so hot”
You aren’t tired of the campfire! You are wary of it!
It’s “I didn’t taste it, let alone finish it.” not “I didn’t finish it, let alone taste it.”. Not those exact words, of course. People get it wrong more often than not IME. The wrong version never makes sense, and it always trips me up.
Oh man, “let alone” is severely misused. Good one!
Don’t think I’ve seen that myself, but that would be pretty fucking annoying for sure.
A whole nother.
Alright (as one word instead of two).
Also USA.
Alright and all right have different meanings to me.
Alright is either a exclamation (“Alright!”) or a synonym for “okay”. (“Everything is going to be alright”)
All right is means all correct. (“The answers were all right”.)
I will die on the alright hill. I have already committed to it, and I have had altogether too much of pedantic prescriptivists /s
But in all seriousness, I use and support “alright” and will never, ever stop using it. But I support your right to be wrong about how language actually works ;)
Meh, we can disagree over beers. I have no qualms with people talking.
Never thought of the idea of “alright” being an issue. I can see why it makes sense, it’s obviously derived from “all right”, though funnily enough that never occurred to me because I’ve always just thought of it as a word in its own right and never pondered its derivation.
So do you also “all ready” and “all though” and “all ways”? That just seems weird.
No, that’d be silly.
Alright, how do you explain this?
It’s aight.
They are free to be wrong. I’m free to be pedantic about things that don’t matter to other people.
Capitalizing black mid-setence. It’s an absolutely ridiculous convention, and something only the American Left could take seriously.
Sincerely, Everyone else
“The proof is in the pudding.”
The actual phrase is: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
It means that your dessert might look and smell delicious, but if you fucked up the recipe, say by using salt instead of sugar, then it will taste bad. You won’t know for sure until you eat it. So, a plan might look good on paper but be a disaster when implemented.
“The proof is in the pudding” doesn’t mean anything.
