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

"Negative... It did not go in. Just affected on the surface." ?

nah....

Haha that's horrible! Maybe you should reply with something like "Sure, I'll letter you when I've computered the data so we can recruitment the people needed"?

(Scary thought: within too long that may not seem as ridiculous as it does now)

nah....

Nah (times google)

The main problem with business writing isn't neologism - it's a kind of stiff, flowless formality. People come into business, think "hmm this is serious writing, when was the last time I did serious writing, oh yes..." and so everything is written in the passive-voice style of a GCSE science project.

Meanwhile back vaguely on topic, comics PR continually uses the phrase "bring their A game", eg. Todd Retch promises to bring his A game to his run on LADY JUGS. I assume it's born out of a deep-seated worry comics creators have about being bad at sports (this is also why Chris Claremont wrote 10,000 boring softball scenes in the X-Men).

how about 'twirl'? does that bother anyone? surely it's an amalgm of twist and swirl?

"... EVER SINCE 9/11."

whew. i'm relieved that that one in particular isn't common usage.

Someone from work once got into a snit with a woman from Iran at a dinner party, because apparently my colleague likes to pronounce it "eye-ran" as opposed to "ear-ahn" and she objected to having the difference pointed out to her. That has got to be one of the smallest-minded things I've ever heard. Made me want to say: You do realize that she's FROM THERE, right?

Obviously if there is anyone with an actual physical addiction to chocolate i have nothing but sympathy for them

What's ignorant about it? We're speaking English not Arabic here or else every time I said Paris, for instance, i'd be pronouncing it Par-ee.

OTM. I can't stand people who say KRAHFT-VAIRK and BYERK.

From the Onion: "I'm Like a Chocoholic, But For Alcohol"

i say "krahft - verk," cuz that's how it's pronounced, and cuz i HATE the americanized dumbing-down of it ("creeeeeyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaft - work" with a nasal short "a"). i say "byork," one syllable, rhymes with "new york." can't stand it when people pronounce it as "beeeee - york." why is the "byuh" sound so difficult? i get annoyed when people say "kuh - nish" instead of "knish" as well.

n/a, language is fluid, but that doesn't excuse people from being dumb.

I just feel like this is a little silly. Like when someone's speaking English and they say the word "Guatemala" but they do the guttaral 'g'/hard 't' "correct" pronunciation, it seems way more affected than just speaking with an American accent (oh no, Americans with American accents!).

"Muslim" is a word in the English langauge, yes, it was originally from Arabic but it's now an English word - like Kayak or something... and you don't pronounce that with an Inuit accent

So why don't you pronounce Bjork like it's pronounced, too? (Rhymes with "work.")

xpost, first of all, it's not "dumbing it down," that's what I'm trying to say. Secondly, what's gained is not having to overanalyze and correct how people naturally speak and just letting them communicate, which is what language is for in the first place.

So why don't you pronounce Bjork like it's pronounced, too? (Rhymes with "work.")

i don't wanna overdo it. plus, i hate bjork. fuck her.

French people don't say "hamburger," they say "'amboorgare." Is that 'incorrect'?

yes.

Or a French version of an English version of a German word.

Errrrrrrrrrrr, not really how these things work you'll find

Yeah, it's stupid and annoying. It's like spelling crazy with a k.

Whereas with Kraftwek you are kind of asked to make some unusual sounds -- and, in the case of the "kraaaft-vairk" types Jaymc is talking about, to affect an unfamiliar method of pronouncing familiar phonemes. So I tend to say "craft - verk," which, when pronounced American-English style, is almost completely indistinguishable from "craft - work."

I.e. rule = if you can say it naturally in your normal English-based speaking voice, then do it. If you can't, don't sweat it. (Though I'm never particularly annoyed by people who know how to say things "right," unless they seem to be making a big show of it.)

(This reminds me of my high school civics teacher, who'd get on all the Mexican students' cases about Americanized pronunciation: "Your name is not Flow-rez, it is FlorES!")

NB my rule on this is informed by the fact that there is a hard S sound in my name that I can successfully pronounce on maybe 10% of attempts, and even then only if I let myself sound like a total jackass trying. I certainly can't expect other people to say it properly, so the most I ask is that people say things as well as they can within their usual phonetic sets.