pet peeves
Pet peeve number one: personifications! I can't stand it when people say things like "society makes us believe that women are inferior," or "racism was the cause of the holocaust." It's scapegoating! And it's lazy. If you want to allegorize, write poetry! Geez...
Pet peeve number two: when people cite the dictionary as an authority! Especially on the internet, when they copy and paste all the little minutiae like pronunciation and alternative meanings! I mean, I admit that language is the battlefield of ideas, but come on... you don't have to try to make people look stupid by showing how you've got dictionary.com bookmarked. What's worse, people do it when they're trying to show off how smart they are, but it just makes them look stupid---a dictionary is descriptive, not prescriptive, and thus it's very possible that some peculiar use of a word is more accurate than that reflected in a dictionary definition.
I mean, come on!
Pet peeve number two: when people cite the dictionary as an authority! Especially on the internet, when they copy and paste all the little minutiae like pronunciation and alternative meanings! I mean, I admit that language is the battlefield of ideas, but come on... you don't have to try to make people look stupid by showing how you've got dictionary.com bookmarked. What's worse, people do it when they're trying to show off how smart they are, but it just makes them look stupid---a dictionary is descriptive, not prescriptive, and thus it's very possible that some peculiar use of a word is more accurate than that reflected in a dictionary definition.
I mean, come on!