1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
Please state in which country your phrase tends to be used, what the phrase is, and what it should be.
Example:
In America, recently came across "back-petal", instead of back-pedal. Also, still hearing "for all intensive purposes" instead of "for all intents and purposes".
Americans saying "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less".
I’ve seen so many attempts at justification for that one online but I can’t help but think that those people just don’t want to admit that they’re wrong.
Discreet vs Discrete used to crack me up on dating sites. All those guys looking for discrete hookups - which kind of makes sense but I am sure is not what they meant.
I literally ground my teeth today because I got an email from a customer service person saying "You're package was returned to us". Not a phishing email with an intentional misspelling, a legitimate email for a real order I made. If it is your JOB to send messages like this they ought not have misspellings.
So the context matters to me. I am more tolerant of spelling errors and mis-phrasing in everyday life than in a professional communication.
Using weary/wary interchangeably. I am tired of people not being aware of the difference.
Also, "decimated". The original usage is to reduce by one tenth. It didn't mean something was nearly or totally annihilated, but thanks to overuse, now it does.
I mean, having one in ten of your fellow soldiers murdered by their own commander is pretty horrific, and I think that's the spirit of its modern usage.
"Could of..."
It's "could have"!
Edit: I'm referring to text based things, like text and email. I can pretty much ignore the mispronouncing.
Having made some of these mistakes, I tend not to be rigid about them. But here are some fun ones.
All of the above have been normalized, but at one time was not.
Another quirk, we used to not call former Presidents President So and So. We used to call them by their highest position before president. So it would be Senator Obama and not President Obama.
That first one really bugs me for an entirely different reason: autocorrect keeps changing them on me.
I thought "on line" was an Eastern US thing; never heard it in the South, Midwest or West Coast.
affect vs effect.
the usual case for effect is as a noun, and for affect, as a verb.
Just to clarify the exceptions to the general rule:
effect as a verb: to cause or bring about
This policy effects change.
affect as a noun: a display of emotion
She greeted us with warm affect.
Interchangeable then/than, or using 'on accident'.
Big 🤡 energy.
What's wrong with the ladder?
*latter
I'm glad some people got my joke, but seriously, what is wrong with "on accident"?
People that think "y" in online gaming means "yeah" instead of "why".
Please state what country your phrase tends to be used
Please state in which country your phrase tends to be used...
Casey Point
Using “uncomfy” instead of uncomfortable. I recognize this one is fully style, but it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Break the entirely fake rules of grammar and spelling all you want, but have some decency when it comes to connotation.
Comfy is an informal and almost diminutive form (not technically, but it follows the structure so it kinda feels like it) of comfortable. You have to have a degree of comfort to use the less formal “comfy,” so uncomfy is just…paradoxical? Oxymoronic? Ironic? I’d be ok with it used for humor, but not in earnest.
Relatedly, for me “comfy” is necessarily referring to physical comfort, not emotional. I can be either comfy or comfortable in a soft fuzzy chair. I can be comfortable in a new social situation. I can be uncomfortable in either. I can be uncomfy in neither, because that would be ridiculous.
FWIW I would never actually correct someone on this. I would immediately have my linguist card revoked, and I can’t point to a real fake grammatical rule that would make it “incorrect” even if I wanted to. But this is the one and only English usage thing I hate, and I hate it very, very much.
"If worse comes to worst..."
In British English, they often say the phrase as "if worst comes to worst," which is based on archaic grammar.
In the US, there's a mix of verb tenses. The only one that make sense in this day and age is "if what is worse comes to be the worst," or "if worse comes to worst."
This point can be argued, but I will be severely wounded (maybe not so much as dying) defending this hill.
This one never gets me anywhere, but “begging the question” is actually a logical fallacy where you assume the result and use that as the basis of your argument. Otherwise, it raises the question.
