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

Criteria instead of criterion

My organisation works with universities and we come into contact with consortia and alumni. For many of my colleagues these have now become the singular form of the words, and daily I hear people talking about "a consortia" and "an alumni".

One of my favorite-ever Futurama jokes was that the idiotic Fry knows the correct usage.

https://morbotron.com/meme/S01E08/19419.jpg?b64lines=V293LCBJIGxvdmUKIHN5bXBvc2lhLg==

similar to how people will say "so and so is BIAS"

"bias" without the "ed" and "graduated school" without the "from" are my all-time least-favorite, most-annoying things

"Graduated school" or "graduated college" seem like very Midwestern/Great Lakes regional usages to me, along with eliminating the "to be" from phrases like "the lawn needs mowed" or "the clothes need washed." I've been hearing those all my life, so they never seemed unusual to me.

People are pretty pleased with themselves for using alumnus, alumna, and alumni correctly, but you can still sometimes zing them with alumnae.

alumnopodes

alumnopotamus

alumninium

rock-ribbed

don't say "effort" when you mean LP or CD or release -- "bryan ferry's first solo effort" -- bcz it makes you sound like a condescending smug and bad teacher who shd immediately fuck off

^ otm

"fell pregnant"

Sounds like a calque from the French 'tomber enceinte'.

that annoys the shit out of me too

You fall pregnant like you fall ill. One for the babby thread?

pleasing echoes of plump, ripe babbies dropping to the floor like apples in autumn

LET THE BABBIES HIT THE FLOOR

eStork battery drained too quickly

Time to bring back, "She's got a bun in the oven".

"We're pregnant" is worse

No, you idiot,

she

"we've fallen pregnant" i think is ok

our bun's fallen into the oven

Great news, we're up the duff.

(week-old xposts) a v occasional and tangential part of my job involves writing emails which go "dear x, as an alumn__ of the University of y you are eligible for..." and the alumnus/-a/-i thing bothers me a lot; picking the right ending can seem too fussy, and alas "alum" seems oldfashioned, but it does bother me seeing "alumni" used in the singular

I think I go with -us as a general singular regardless of gender but sooner or later a classicist/pedant is going to be mad at being misgendered

(but I'm not sure I'd particularly appreciate feeling like someone had taken the time and conscious deliberation to assign me the correct feminine ending either? and then there's the risk of guessing wrong)

alumna is the correct neuter plural ending, use that if you want to rile literally everyone

side note: I'm sure I saw a linguistics paper once that said (though the details were way beyond my understanding) that it's no coincidence that Latin and Greek feminine forms, and perhaps other languages too, resemble neuter plurals - but last time I went looking for this theory I couldn't find anything, probably because I don't know any of the relevant words to search for

so if anyone has any idea what I might be talking about please do let me know, esp if you can find a dumbed-down version of the hypothesis suitable for non-book-learnin' morons (mora!) like myself

I say bring back the "Dual" of early & Attic Greek and possibly v. early Latin too: a special ending required for if I have to email exactly two alums at once

haven't noticed that yet, but have noticed people pronouncing tenets "tenants."

I've been seeing/hearing this a lot lately and find it vaguely annoying

also, increasingly seeing "slither" used for, I guess, "sliver" - "a little slither of cake" etc - this bothers me for some reason

People who say ‘the floor’ when they are talking about/should say ‘the ground’. Cretins.

slither for sliver
and phased for fazed
annoy the hell out of me

and I'll just say it again: michievious for mischievous

i have started considering the floor-ground thing bcz it so reliably enrages suzy

As Boaby would say, the flerr/grun hing.

Is this in a gardening context?

‘Forest floor’ is the only acceptable use of ‘floor’ outdoors that I can think of right now. All it takes is a particularly thick police officer talking about someone falling on the floor when it would be accurate to say ground, pavement or road to set me off.

I mean, say what you want about the tenants of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

feel bad about where i dropped those babbies now :(

Just use deck instead.

This bad thread is never worse than when it is just listing every meme, but

“____ can have a little ____, as a treat”

is annoying cause the original image said “cats can have little a salami” and these things matter

"‘Forest floor’ is the only acceptable use of ‘floor’ outdoors that I can think of right now."

How about "ocean floor"?

'sleeps' as a noun has been mentioned, but it's still like #1 THE WORST

I say bring back the "Dual" of early & Attic Greek and possibly v. early Latin too: a special ending required for if I have to email exactly two alums at once

Old English had dual forms of 1st and 2nd person pronouns, but they disappeared by the 1300s:

wit "we two"
git "us two"
unc "you two"
inc "you two" (accusative)

Had a neuter third person, too (hit).

tbf i use all those words except unc, which my niece uses of me

Just saying there's an opening for "yeet" as the first-person dual pronoun in Modern English

a few years i jokingly suggested alumnx as a solution to this problem.

since then i’ve become aware that at least one college has started doing so

xp

you can just call them "wallets"

"Fixed your headline for ya"

i have started considering the floor-ground thing bcz it so reliably enrages suzy

Fuck that. Ground is floor. Apartment is house.