I SAID, ‘DO YOU SPEAK-A MY LANGUAGE?’

This was about the point where my wife’s pregnancy kicked into full gear.–mh

Vidiot is talking about word usage pet peeves, and he’s got some goodies:

decimate, nauseous, imply/infer, less/fewer, disinterested, chaise longue, bemuse

I was almost offended by that last one. Anyway, here’s my list of Language Things Which Rub Me The Wrong Way.*

• your/you’re: Come on, is this really that hard to remember?
• impact as a synonym for affect: You’ve got a perfectly good word–affect–which everybody understands. So why replace it with an ugly word that doesn’t even mean the same thing? Oh, yeah, because too many writers are too lazy to learn the difference between affect and effect. There’s only one way to spell impact, so you can never be wrong.
• spelled-out mispronunciations like playa hata, dat, and a’ight: No, you don’t look cool. You look like the General Foods marketing department trying to get 8-year-olds to buy into your concept of ‘extreme branded toaster pastry-based cold breakfast cereal.’
• ‘I could care less’: This implies that you care a little bit. Perhaps you meant you couldn’t care less?
• ‘athiest’ instead of ‘atheist’: I’ve known a few atheists in my time, but none of them were particularly athy, so it’s hard to say if any of them qualified as the ‘athiest.’ But it does sound like something a starlet would’ve said in in a 50s ‘B’ movie: “Oh, Moondog, you’re the athiest!”
• ‘the exception that proves the rule’: All this phrase means is, if the sign says ‘NO PARKING 3 AM-6 AM,’ you can park there any other time.
• disinterested/uninterested: The first means ‘unbiased,’ the second, well, ‘uninterested.’
• mixture: Technically, if you can’t separate the things being combined, it’s not a mixture, it’s a compound. The Chex Mix is a mixture, the fruit punch is a compound.

(*: or is it ‘That Rub Me The Wrong Way’? I can never remember . . . I think it’s actually ‘That.’)