A big pet peeve of mine is imprecise or incorrect language. For instance, the expression “so don’t I” drives me nuts, because people use it to mean “so do I.” When I hear “so don’t I,” I always respond by saying, “You don’t?” I guess that drives other people nuts. Here are a few others: Irregardless is commonly used instead of “regardless.” For instance, “I like him regardless of his political views” means that I like him without any regard towards his political views.If you say, “I like him irregardless of his political views,” it actually means that whether or not you like him depends on his political views. If that’s not what you mean, then use regardless, not irregardless.
A couple more, one being couple: Couple is two. “What a nice couple.” You say that when you mean two people who are together. “Give me a couple of hot dogs, please.” That means you want two hot dogs. If you mean more than two, then say, “a few” or “several.” Sometimes people say the colloquialism, “a couple of few.” At least that’s how it sounds to me. I don’t really know what they’re saying, but I hear it often. If you know what “a couple of few” means, please comment on this blog post and tell me.
I thought of a couple of pet peeves to write about, but then more came to mind. So I’m writing several. It’s sort of like a whining session… oops! Let’s talk about “sort of” and “like.” I think of these as equivalent: fillers that should be excised from most of our vocabularies. You can even add “very” and “really.” The way I see it, these fillers are used to do either of two things: 1. replace silence. 2. be combined with a poor word choice to indicate a word that the speaker/writer can’t think of. For example:”Dude, it was like really scary.” How about saying what it actually was, such as, “Dude, it was terrifying.” No filler. Appropriate word choice. If there’s a split second of silence that you’re filling with sort of, like, very or really… then let there be silence. Silence adds dramatic tension. Silence gives you time to think of the right word. Silence is golden. Be okay with silence. Silence is your friend. Over and out.
