Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

I'd forgotten about it implying 'pompous' as always think of it as 'portending' something (thanks, English GCSE!) so... I guess? I do not like it though

It doesn't is what I'm saying. It's just about portent. But that's not how I see it used

yeah there's probably a technical word for this - a word gradually acquires a new usage because it happens to sound similar to a word with a different meaning

at some point with enough usage then the new "meaning" becomes legitimate i guess, i.e. dictionaries will give it, however rooted in straight wrongness this process is

http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-jej1.htm

this piece about "jejune" is a little dry (ironically) but it details an instance of a similar process

It's the same confusion people show when using "reticent" versus "reluctant."

yes - and in both cases you can kinda understand why the slip is happening beyond just the words sounding similar. something being portentous - full of mystery and foreboding - could kind of strike one as pretentious. being inhibited or reserved is a kind of reluctance - to speak. but what really bothers me about portentous and pretentious is that it's confused by ppl who really should know better - ppl who do know the word pretentious but choose not to use it in favor of a different word that means something else entirely.

i usually look askance at people using "pretentious" as an insult anyway so

yes it does seem vaguely anti-intellectual which is maybe another reason pseudos try to replace it w/ portentous which sounds like it may carry a more neutral tone?

at some point with enough usage then the new "meaning" becomes legitimate i guess, i.e. dictionaries will give it, however rooted in straight wrongness this process is

it looks like this has already happened, if I put "portentous definition" into google then it gives me the following:

adjective
- of or like a portent; of momentous significance.
"this portentous year in Canadian history"
synonyms: ominous, warning, foreshadowing, predictive, premonitory, prognosticatory, momentous, fateful; More

- done in a pompously or overly solemn manner so as to impress.
"the author's portentous moralizings"
synonyms: pompous, bombastic, self-important, pontifical, ponderous, solemn, sonorous, grandiloquent, declamatory, overblown, overripe, inflated, rhetorical, oratorical
"Dr Chen muttered some portentous dialogue"

NV: catachresis?

Feel like the AP has just given up lately.

http://i.imgur.com/DA7yQEC.jpg?1

Puffin - yeah i guess so altho i don't think catachresis covers the "word ends up acquiring its misuse as a new valid definition" element

That waitlist (n) wait-list (v) kind of thing doesn't bother me at all.

Lots of compounds do similar costume changes when used in different ways. Mostly they tend to close over time, but they do so by degrees.

Compare: "She owns a small business." Noun. Vs. "She is a small-business owner." Compound modifier. Hyphenated to avoid potential ambiguity over whether she's small or the business is small.

Is there ambiguity introduced by wait list vs. waitlist vs. wait-list? No, not really, but it isn't weird on its face to have the noun close faster than the verb.

Ugh, so glad wait list and wait-list haven't made it across the Atlantic yet. Give it time though.

I'm very annoyed by people who mis-pronouce things in a jokey way too often, and then begin insisting that their pronunciation is correct and is the one you must use in their earshot.

Person a: Have you seen this bio-pic? (pronounces bio-pic as a normal human would)
Person b: You mean a biopic? (pronounces it like a piece of medical equipment)

This also goes for people who say Spiderman the way one would say Lieberman. It may have been funny once.

what kind of people do you hang out with

lol

I said "biopic" once in high school and a kid said "bio-pic? I think you mean biopic [to rhyme with myopic]" I wonder whatever happened to him

eaten by a lion

one of my colleagues just now on the telephone said he'd go through something with a "tooth comb" perhaps a slip of the tongue but just as likely that he thinks a there is a thing called a "tooth comb"

replacing flossing iirc

My friend told me someone he knew was "Vapor acted" the other day

eaten by a lion

always pronounced it "lee-on" and didn't understand the warning shout

also people who pronounce Sci-fi as "Siffy"

i say "ess eff" cos i know some SF nerds who get really pissy about "Sy Fy"

i watched one of those cheesy in-class movies in Biology once in high school where the dude kept referring to the element as "al-yoo-min-ee-um" and laughed at him only to realize years later that we in North America are the only idiots who say it/spell it "aluminum"

i know! i seem to recall reading a long time ago that your pronunciation is older/more etymologically established tho

http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/aluminium.htm

there you go, U-S-A, U-S-A

but then weirdly i guess Americans don't use "calcum" or "potassum" or etc

I'm not a fan of wait-list being a verb in the first place.

"Placed on the wait list" is fine. Why is anyone in such a hurry, since we're already literally talking about WAITING?

Also I have seen SciFi (the cable TV channel) jocularly spelled as if it were pronounced "Skiffy." (On Facebook, so, take that for what it's worth.)

They changed their name to SyFy which is like... so much worse than "skiffy" jokes

when I worked in a call centre it seemed like the majority of customers over the age of, say, 60 pronounced WiFi as "wiffy" - it didn't annoy me, though

but it was weird when they pronounced "spiffy" as 'spy-fy'

I know a person from the Netherlands who says wifi as "veefee," which is correct for many Yurpean languages, and I actually find it kinda charming. I don't do this myself in USian contexts, as I do not enjoy getting punched in the mouth

I've heard it pronounced "weefy" across Central and South America.

ya wifi is pronounced weefee in a lot of places which is cool

in south america i've heard it pronounced interneto which is awesome

interneato

Mine: People saying 'mischievious'

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'tweetstorm', as though someone typing with their thumbs on a phone is some awesome display of majestic rage. 12 consecutive sentences is not a storm. It's a paragraph.

"sessions." Every fucking music blog/wanna be publication calls their live sets "sessions."

Haha, good friend of mine who is a professional event DJ, has lots of radio experience, etc. puts up Instagram photos all the time of what he's listening to on his turntable and labels them "vinyl session."

"session" just screams tongue-clicking indieboy thoughtfulness to me idk it makes my skin crawl

http://i.imgur.com/yQgFiTp.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/IivJYSL.png

http://i.imgur.com/UouLy1f.jpg

'tweetstorm', as though someone typing with their thumbs on a phone is some awesome display of majestic rage. 12 consecutive sentences is not a storm. It's a paragraph.

― 🐸a hairy howling toad torments a man whose wife is deathly ill (James Morrison), Thursday, August 4, 2016 12:25 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the term and the genre equally irritate me. Just write a fucking op-ed.

Your opinion about Trump is not the fucking tractatus logico-philosophicus

xpost yeah, there's something super annoying about all the knuckle-cracking and here-we-going before someone fires off 20 tweets. But I suppose confining that much self-righteousness to a single paragraph might cause some kind of black hole to appear in the internet.

JM laying down a tweetstorm truthbomb

tweetstorm truthbomb thumbstrain

I'm getting pretty tired of the ironic usage of lizard people/person