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 saying “exscape”, “expresso”, “pasghetti”
About 1 in 3 posters here say “loose” when they mean “lose”
As a non native speaker, it really irks me when people mix up “brake” and “breake”, specially among car enthusiasts.
Every time I try to slow down my car, I hear chopped up and recontextualized Amens…
One thing is different from another, not than. One thing differs from another. It’s different from the other thing.
Although in the UK it’s “different to” for some reason.
My pet peeve is when people use “then” but they actually meant to use “than”. I think it might be mainly due to flaws in predictive text on phone keyboards though.
Fuck yes. Most annoying mistake in English. Seems to have sharply risen during the last few years
More then a few made the mistake back than, too.
It’s one of those ones that bother me too as a non-native speaker, they’re such different words from each other when you learn them more from reading than oral exposure. The they’re/their/there trio is another one where I can’t fathom how people have issues distinguishing them.
“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.
Across the Anglosphere people seem to use “generally” and “genuinely” almost interchangeably these days.
It’s “a couple of minutes” not “a couple minutes”. Americans tend to drop it for speed, but it kind of fits with the accent I guess.
As far as Americanisms go, this is my least favourite… They seem to be dropping the “go” from the aforementioned and it throws me right off the sentence every time.
breaked vs broke
Respect the irregular verbs
I know someone that says ‘Pacific’ instead of ‘specific’. The man has his talents & his place in the world, food man, but yes that is infuriating.
Discreet vs Discrete used to crack me up on dating sites. All those guys looking for discrete hookups - which kind of makes sense but I am sure is not what they meant.
I literally ground my teeth today because I got an email from a customer service person saying “You’re package was returned to us”. Not a phishing email with an intentional misspelling, a legitimate email for a real order I made. If it is your JOB to send messages like this they ought not have misspellings.
So the context matters to me. I am more tolerant of spelling errors and mis-phrasing in everyday life than in a professional communication.
they ought not have misspellings
Wouldn’t it be “ought not to”?
Why no! In the negative (ought not) you don’t need the to.
Neat. That gives me old British author vibes
Yeah /yĕ′ə, yă′ə, yā′ə/ is a different word than Yea /yā/
The only one that continues to bug me is using “an” instead of “a” before a word that starts with a consonant sound. I especially dislike the phrase “an historic” (as in “it was an historic victory”) which has bafflingly been deemed acceptable. Unless you’re a cockney, it should be “a historic”. The rule is to use “an” if the word starts with a vowel sound, and “a” otherwise. IMO.
it sounds like yunicorn, so it’s a unicorn, not an unicorn.
I follow Jeremy Clarkson and intentionally always use the wrong one. There’s an horse. A apple.
Ditto.
Well hell, I use “an” before historic, every time.
It’s fine if you drop the letter “h” when you speak - like I do. It then becomes “an ‘istoric” and sounds correct.
I’ve mentioned this here before but in the UK “an historic” is written because we are slowly dropping the letter “h” at the front of words from pronunciation. UK people often say “an ‘istoric” so it kinda makes sense… but looks clumsy.
honour, hour, homage, honest, heir
It also makes it more clear your not saying “ahistoric” or “ahistorical”
I believe this comes from people trying to show off their education. Traditionally, words with a french descent were pronounced with a silent H. So for example hospital (from French hôpital) is an hospital, where hound (from Germanic hund) is a hound.
This is pretty much deprecated these days and anyone enforcing it is beyond grammar nazi, but it’s interesting to know the pattern.
Source: my secondary school English teacher.
“If worse comes to worst…”
In British English, they often say the phrase as “if worst comes to worst,” which is based on archaic grammar.
In the US, there’s a mix of verb tenses. The only ones that make sense in this day and age is “if what is worse comes to be the worst,” or “if worse comes to worst.”
This point can be argued, but I will be severely wounded (maybe not so much as dying) defending this hill.
This one never gets me anywhere, but “begging the question” is actually a logical fallacy where you assume the result and use that as the basis of your argument. Otherwise, it raises the question.
How do you feel about other words or phrases that have different meanings in specific fields vs common use? Like a scientific theory is very different from your buddy’s theory about what the movie you watched meant. Since beg is a stronger word than raise, some statements scream out for questions in response, while others merely give rise to some further need for clarification.
The same goes for the exception that proves the rule. People use it as a magic spell that does away with unwanted evidence but it’s self explanatory. No parking on Fridays means you can park every other day.
That’s actually a post-hoc rationalization; in the original phrase, “proves” has a meaning closer to “tests”. But, yes, people use this one all the time to justify being wrong either way.
There’s an exception to every rule (except that one)
Irregardless
“Most best”
