Utilize butts, lol.

The term “spiral staircase” is a misnomer, as they are actually helical. I have absolutely no faith that this misnomer will go away…

If you shuffle your feet on the carpet and and touch a metal doorknob you may be “shocked” but it is doubtful you will be “electrocuted” as “electrocuted” means death by electricity. The “cuted” part is the tip-off.

Native Americans hunted the bison, not the buffalo. The buffalo is an African animal.

I am actually NOT an insufferable prick in person…

Anal language people like me can join me in reading Pain in the English where they blog about this topic all the time.

Then again, I’m kind of a hypocrite, since somebody corrected me the other day on my spelling of caché vs. cachet and I sorta flipped my lid. I was really sensitive about it for some reason, and got all “Well, *I* will spell it how I want and who cares and leave me alone and blah blah blah!!”

I guess if I had to pick a consistently peevish pet I have about language, it’d be when I tell people I’m a linguist and the first thing they say is “Oh, neat. How many languages do you speak?” I usually tell them “one”. But that comes off rather snarky. I’ve never found a good way to answer that question, other than saying something akin to “That’s like asking a writer how many typewriters he has, or a plumber how many toilets he owns”.

When I was a pharmacist, people would sometimes give me a description of what kind of oral solid drug they were trying to identify. Inevitably, the first question I would have to ask was “was it a tablet or a capsule”? I kid you not, some times people would respond, “well, it was a pill…”

For many people “pill” means a tablet or a capsule, but really it is neither.

Heh. I don’t recall which ones, but I’ve seen that mistake pop up in a few books. They weren’t ones by small, first-time authors either. It must of have been careless editing or typesetting, I guess.

How are the exotic keystroke combinations of programing fundamentally different? To me they differ only in degree, not in kind, but I’ll admit I’m arguing from ignorance here, as my knowledge of programming is at the total n00b level.

I think my bias against “keyboarding” came about when I encountered it in reference to childhood education. It seems to me kids need to learn how to type before they advance to “keyboarding”.

But how do you describe that set of skills that are related distinctly to the use of a computer keyboard rather than a manual or electric typewriter? They’re not the same, and in that context I’ve talked pretty naturally about “keyboarding skills” in the past and will probably do so in the future. It’s niche — I don’t see any reason for it to overtake “typing” as the default word for “typing at a keyboard” — but it has its own little neighborhood of usefulness to me.

I am not crazy! I am not British either! But I like precision when I am writing!

The use of “Irregardless.” It may or may not be a word, but just use Regardless FFS. Not really rational, but it irritates me. My current teacher uses it all the time and I just want to poke his eyes out every time I hear it.

They’re/their/there. It’s grammar school time. Come on, you can do it!

Gah!

“Hive mind”: I hate it, it’s disgusting and misleading. There is no hive. When you are at a conference and the speaker asks a question and somebody takes the mike and answers it, this answer doesn’t come from the “room mind” or the “conference attendees’ mind”. It comes from one person. A bunch of people doesn’t a hive make.

Sure, the “Wisdom of crowds” (as much as it is validated) could be considered a hive mind thingy, because it is not dependent on individuals but on statistics.

But answers in AskMe, as in Wikipedia, don’t come from any hive nor any collective mind. There is nothing collective in the person who answers a question. The only collective thing about it is the resulting accumulated knowledge: the AskMe database and the Wikipedia database are collective works. But questions are asked to people and answers come from one person at a time.

Therefore all “hive mind” users should be mocked, tarred and feathered.

Note: there is no BBQ mind either, no offense intended.

Now that’s just fightin’ words right there.

FellinBlank, it might be fun to buy a pentacle necklace and paint your nails black neck time you have a check-up scheduled. Or write, “Satan Rules” on your knuckles with black pen.

Case in point: several years ago I went to see my general practitioner with some horrible gastrointestinal virus-of-doom. So I’m hunched over in the exam room, pallid, clammy, barely conscious, listing to port, and ready to heave, and when he asks me about my symptoms, I mention that I’m feeling quite nauseous.

“Nauseous?” he sneers, drawing back in derisive shock. “You mean nauseated. As an English professor should know, nauseous means “provoking nausea,” not “experiencing nausea.” This man is so fucking lucky I don’t carry a gun, especially since he also has a tendency to spout religious-fanatic bromides during check-ups. (Hey, GPs are in very short supply hereabouts, so you’ve got to take what you get, OK?)

OH. Also. On accident. Something happened on accident. It drives me insane, but I’ve started picking up on it. Dammit people, things happen BY accident. *cry*