Common mistakes that bug you....

RBNYC's "Frankenstein" thread got me thinking.

My biggest peeve is "immaculate conception". Nearly EVERYBODY, even Catholics, think it refers to the virgin birth, or Mary's conception of Jesus via the Holy Spirit.

It doesn't. At all.

It refers to Mary's MOTHER conceiving Mary. All conception, according to Catholic doctrine, comes with original sin. Since Mary had to be without sin in order to bear Jesus, SHE was conceived without original sin - i.e., immaculately conceived.


What's your peeve?

confusing velocity and speed,... even worse, one of those for accelaration.

im a speed/velocity/acceleration freak too... but another one that gets me is people uisng power and voltage interchangably...

but then again, im a geek.

-LK

which can be disasterous, especially during an exam.

I mean, geez, they're not even close.

Even Star Trek TNG made some stupid physics nomenclature mistakes (I'll grant them all the fantasy physics they want, it's a sci-fi show, but considering the work they put in to come up with explanations that at last sound good for the weird stuff they did, but to then say stupid things at other times like "our inertia is carrying us into the sun" is just dumbness)

But, it's not just Star Trek, it's all over on TV and movies, all this stupid physics stuff.

I remember in the Tarzan movie of the 1980s, we were watching it in my fraternity house (all engineers, save one business major) and in one scene Tarzan swings dramatically from way left screen to way right screen giving his Tarzan yell and almost every one of us engineers yelled out, "Where's the doppler! That sounded stupid as shit!"

It should be a jailable offense, as far as I'm concerned.

-MR

"I could care less." That means you DO CARE. See?

"Nip it in the butt." No, it's "nip it in the bud." - it means to stop something before it grows into something larger. Butts don't grow larger unless you stop exercising!

Using "your" instead of "you're"

"Its" is the proper possessive. "It's" means "it is." Nothing else, dammit!

in a Canadian/Britishe context, I was taught that the singular possessive also uses the apostrophied form.

I have never heard that "it's" as a possessive was considered acceptable usage anywhere? Where was this? Do you know if it's a Canadian thing, British English, a local variation? It could be a holdover from long ago or a new relaxed grammatical rule (God, I hope not).

Where did you grow up?

used as a measure of time rather than distance.

I LOVE that one.

:grr:

Learn which one to use! Lemme help you out:

"I'm going to lose my marbles!" or "GWB is going to lose this coming November." = Right use of the word "lose"

"This rope is pretty loose. Let me tie it tighter." = loose, meaning not tight.

THERE!

Unique means one of a kind. It can't be modified.

Also, please let there be some sort of majority other than a vast one.

Unique is one of my peeves, too.

As for "majority", I DO read "a slight majority" or "a bare majority" on occasion.

grammar is too easy. I'm talking about IDEAS.

That being said, I'm a bit of a physics dunce. What's the difference between speed and velocity?

they have the same units (distance / time).


Going 60 mph is speed.

Going 60 mph East is velocity, although, it would be expressed as a vector <60,0,0>mph or 60*<1,0,0>, if you like, assuming east is +x axis.

direction it's going in.

that is blaspheme.

Dang. I got Captain Kirk and Luke Skywalker mixed up! :evilgrin:

It's blasphemy. The act is to blaspheme. Do not blaspheme blasphemy by spelling it blasphemously as "blaspheme".

:evilgrin:

p.s. - seems that engineers and science types are some of the worst offenders, besides those who are just plain ignorant and have no idea how language or things work in general.

Drives me absolutely insane! I just went off on the neighbor kid (16 y.o. male) who wants to enlist in the Navy to do "NEWCULAR". I think I may have overreacted, but he is a Bushbot, fundy hypocrite, so what the heck.

mediocre note the prefix "medi-" as in "medium".

it means AVERAGE or SO-SO. ORDINARY. MIDDLING.

it does NOT mean worse than that.

reminds me of the usual misspelling of "minuscule" as "miniscule", thinking that "mini" means small, therefore.....


it comes from "minute" (my-newt, not minnit)

"Wholistic" instead of "holistic". New Age illiteracy P*SSES ME OFF!!!!!

:nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke:

oh sorry, non-political thread....

Drives me nuts.

:hi:

Im rarely irritated by misspelling, bad grammar, mis-pronunciation.

I know nada about physics and science. But I can remember a hundred phone numbers in my head

That drives me out of my mind, and I hear otherwise well-spoken people doing it all the time. When one wishes to orient one's self, one goes to an orientation. At the end, one should feel oriented.

All my life, I thought it was "Mary's" conception of "Jesus".
In fact, I was taught that at Catholic school.

No wonder I'm a recovering Catholic. :silly: :crazy:

a lotta people don't know that.

Everytime a "nice" girl gets knocked up, people joke about an "immaculate conception". It's wrong.

I just looked it up on the web and you are 100% correct, not that I ever doubted you, Dookus. :think:

I must say though, I am more than a little pissed at my 8th grade teacher, Sister Mary Elephant.
She's had me believing a lie for close to 25 years!

Who'd have thunk it, huh?
The Catholic church lying to schoolchildren.
I'm shocked. :wow:

that's another common mistake -- people claiming to believe in things when they don't even know what they're claiming....

good 'un

was 'laboring under a misconception'

;)

1. People who drive only 40 mph on the onramp to the interstate.
2. People who use their f@cking cell phones while walking down busy hallways or in the lunch line.
3. People who have pet peeves about obscure facts.

obscure fact? It's a central tenet of Christianity.

and probably also Orthodox Christianity, but outside that - into the world of Protestantism and others - I don't think you'll find much interest in whether Mary was immaculately conceived or not. In fact, you'll find a lot of people who really wonder if Mary was even a virgin when Jesus was conceived, or if it even matters.

But thank you for pointing out that the immaculate conception refers to Mary's mother's conception, not Mary's. Bothers me when people don't know that, especially Catholics, for whom it is an important thing.

Ditto predated and predating versus peyed upon and preying.

I'm not an english wizard by no means, but the I and me thing drives me nut.
It blows my mind to hear newscasters or radio personalities to say something like "Join Julie and I on action 3 super duper news at 11".
Or when I see pictures posted with "My wife and I". (But now I'm wondering about that one)

In places where there are large numbers of people, the failure to try to walk on the right. I don't want to be a nut about it, but it improves the flow of people so readily in places like malls, supermarkets, and sidewalks. The only place I've seen another system work is Manhattan (well, it's not a system, everybody just seems to find an opening and grab it).

A language mistake that bothers me is the use of "begging the question" that I've seen frequently where it is used to mean "raising the question." Example: "The lack of witnesses to Bush's service in Alabama begs the question of whether Bush showed up." "Begging the question" is a logical fallacy in which your statement assumes the premise that you are trying to prove (in other words, a loaded assertion); often an opinion is presented as fact as a means of avoiding supporting the assertion. Example: "Liberals are traitors who should leave the country." The assertion neither proves that liberals are traitors nor provides evidence as to why liberals should leave the country. Statements that say, "Everybody knows," "We all agree," etc. are other examples of begging the question (note, this is a very common Republican manner of talking -- how often have you heard a Republican say, "The American people know/say/believe" followed by some winger notion they're pushing?).

I think this misuse is becoming more common these days for some reason. Or maybe I'm noticing it more? It drives me up a wall!

I don't care about the speed limit, many, if not most states require you to keep left except to pass. It's just a courtesy to do it anyway. Unless you're faster than everyone else, get out of the left lane.

In my opinion is the loss of the "keep right except to pass" sign and in its place a "slower traffic keep right". What guy will think he is a slower driver?

I was driving a school van the other day in the right lane, doing the speed limit. I passed a guy on the right. When I got back, he had called the district to complain about one of their drivers passed him on the right! The &*%$ van has a 65 mph governor on it.

and:

flustrating
mute point
irregardless

...and using "lemmings jumping over a cliff" as an analogy, since they DO NOT DO THAT!!

On edit, for all those who thought that lemmings do jump off cliffs...that is Disney's fault.

http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/081003/out_lemmings.shtml
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03304/235522.stm

I don't seriously expect anyone to know anything, but if a paid writer, publisher, editor, or web designer doesn't even know the difference between these very basic three little words...well...I give up...the human race is too stupid to survive.

Clearly this error bugs me all out of proportion.

...see, the problem is spell-check doesn't catch it. And we thought calculators would make people not understand the basics of math... looks like spell-check is the death of our language.

When I taught technical writing, that was one of the first things I brought up, and repeated numerous times. I had a simple policy: Use it's or its incorrectly and you fail.

Never managed to flunk anybody... pity; I'd have enjoyed that.

:evilgrin:

We use an item called a bill of lading as proof of delivery. Absolutely drives me insane when I hear people say "bill of ladings" instead of "bills of lading" and NOBODY (except me) ever says it right. Worse than fingernails on a chalkboard!!!!

Or "Commander-in-Chiefs" for that matter.

the contraction for "you are" is "you're". "Your" is a possessive.
the contraction for "it is" is "it's" Its means "belonging to it."
There are no such words as "hypocrate" or "hippocrasy." People who practice HYPOCRISY are HYPOCRITES.

I just got a piece of spam in my inbox whose subject line reads "Look great this summer, while sleeping!" You mean I can only look great while I'm sleeping? (For me that would be a 33% improvement right there.)

I hate it when people use nouns as verbs. When did "impact" and "conference" become verbs? What was wrong with "affect" and "confer?" What's wrong with "burgle?" Why does it have to have "-ize?"

Someone needs to impact the side of my head with a stick so that I stop this ranting.

Though in fairness, even Robert McNeil made this mistake in "Burden of Desire", although he may have simply had an incompetent editor at the publishing house.

"Here, here" means "Hey! Cut that out!"
"Hear, hear" means "Hooray! I endorse this idea!"

So there...

:mad:

And with the "8" and "S" and "B" and "3" put on the sign-board UPSIDE DOWN.

Just typing this makes me grind my teeth.