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”.
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.
Are you also upset that “December” doesn’t refer to the tenth month anymore?
Yes. It’s infuriating that the months called “Seventh Month,” “Eighth Month,” “Ninth Month,” and “Tenth Month” are months 9-12.
Stupid January and February fucking everything up…
IIRC it was July and August, them being added to the calendar messed up the months, so January and February are innocent.
Damn Julius and Augustus!
Actually January and February were added to the end of the calendar. Used to be March was the first of the year. Which is why Sept (month 7) through December (month 10) are months 7-10 after March.
December was the last month of the year and then there was just this empty time from December through March, they didn’t have a month for it because they were agrarian and that time they didn’t really do anything anyway. March being the start of spring, being the logical time to start a new year for them.
Later they added January and February. Which is why February has a short month, it was the last of the year, a logical place to have an odd number of days month.
At some point someone decided January should be the first of the year and then moved it. I forget when that happened.
That “decimated” ship has sailed. The common usage changed long ago so getting pedantic about the original meaning does not help.
We didn’t have internet then but we do now. This is exactly what we need. It’s good to have flexibility for new words, for slang, even new meanings but let’s make sure mistakes don’t change the meaning of things
The word internet refers to a network of networks and the Internet is the world wide network of networks. Like many words that require the use of a Shift key, most people use internet instead of Internet. Forgoing the use of periods is becoming quite common as well.
Autocorrect is actually less convenient for punctuation. I’ll fight autocorrect when it substitutes random words but it can have my periods
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.
Must have been great for morale.
/s just in case
Reduce TO one tenth?
Nope, reduced by 10%, leaving you with 90% of the original quantity.
Ah, TIL, I thought it was a reduction TO 10%, but I see you are correct!
I hear ‘weary’ used in place of ‘wary’, I don’t think I’ve come across the reverse. Drives me crazy though.
Yep. This is the one. It irks the heck out of me when people are saying something to the effect of “I had a bad experience once, now I’m tired and fatigued about this situation in the future.”
Or “I would be worn out, like after a long hike or something, about things that sound too good to be true, folks! Be careful!”
Agghhh! Lol. I get English can be awfully confusing sometimes but I’ve been seeing this one pop up a LOT more recently.
(Dis)honors also go to “loosing my keys” or “being a stealthy rouge”
Like I get someone tried to say leery or wary at the same time and it came out all jumbled. But then the mistake took on a terrible life of its own.
Lol exactly! I’m sure there’s gotta be some studies on this, with the prevalence of review-less written words all over the internet, and a lot of users interacting with it at a young age, or being newer to English, I’m sure there’s plenty of instances where they see it done wrong and just go “Hey that must be how it works!”
And it just spreads from there. But c’mon, this wouldn’t be so bad with a basic foundation in phonetics, folks! :(
I only wish:
I actually kinda appreciated the reddit bots that did this. They weren’t wrong and only the severest of simpletons goes ape on an automated script lol.