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

I need an around the frae girl

Bamboo earrins

based off of is good and correct

im professional sub editor, i sub it in even if its not there

With "off" being transitive I thought it didn't need "of," but I defer to you.

rhythmic necessity

Based af.

deems is correct, english has no actual rules except what feels good, to me
— bob marley again

Don't let dem fool ya

Emancipate yourself off of mental slavery

- Bob Marley

dreadful quotes

lolz! xp

Get into my dreams
Get off of my car

Get Offa my Dike

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWXnVOgzqvc

based off of = based on?

"based off of" helps suggest that additional weird elements have crept in

yep, analogous to copied off of = copied from (see also "got off on")

For some people "based off" is probably being parsed as a phrasal verb (and why wouldn't it, English famously has over ten thousand of them) so tacking a prepositional phrase at the end of it is perfectly natural. But if you insist the construction is "based + prepositional phrase" then "based off of" is not going to work for you.

i am an accelerationist descriptivist who is also a professional sub-editor, its wild over here

f hazel always making sense
trying to explain phrasal verbs to my students always leads to long faces -- there are SO many of them and the meaning of each one is not logical. we talked about "take ____" once and it actually reduced our morale :-/

phrasal verbs are probably the most annoying thing about the english language, so intuitively understood by native speakers, so impenetrable to everyone else. I think being aware of them when grading your speech might be the biggest eureka moment for a novice esl teacher.

the list of phrases with 'take' is only surpassed in ridiculousness by the many uses of 'set'

yeah you could probably take fifty common verbs and the fifty most common prepositions and make a matrix of phrasal verb definitions from them that would be baffling in its randomness

a matrix out of

thinking about phrasal verbs makes me equal parts frustrated and sad -- frustrated for myself as a teacher and sad for my students that i have to tell them "it's possible u will never learn this"

i do enjoy explaining the difference between a phrasal verb and a prepositional phrase though
that's doable

it always makes me smile when I think of my grandmother, who would routinely come down hard on us kids for the most trivial grammatical transgressions, but whose everyday speech was full of phrases like "don't take on so" and "get away with you"

take up
take out
take in
take with
take to
take after
take on

each with its own quite different distinct meaning

the lovely Emma complained a lot about this iirc, see also every verb ever, i.e.

see to
see out
see around

etc

take back
take forward
take away

take down

sure lookit

German is just as exasperating in this regard, perhaps even more so.

i like it

The interesting thing to me (not a linguist) is that it seems difficult to impossible to explain the meaning of “take” alone in many of those verbs. “Take with” you can gloss “take” as “bring” but in “take after”, how could you possibly gloss the “take” half by itself? “Take after” just means “resemble”

it is impossible as each phrasal verb with take + [x] has a discrete meaning. also each phrasal verb usually has a regular action verb that could take (hehehe) its place.

we talked about "take ____" once and it actually reduced our morale :-/ you can see how frustrating it is for learners

take after is to follow

covers someone being alike in more than just resemblance, i suppose

"im awful with money, i take after my father that way"

kind of thing

take after food

It would be fascinating to somehow measure how much of one's speech a group of people/a class etc understand and how much is lost - through garbled syntax, use of inappropriate language (at both vocabulary and semantic level), simple zoning out. It'd have to be pretty high, right?

Most people, most of the time, are depending on context to interact with others... if you've ever spent time doing transcription, you know that after the fact a conversation between 3-4 people is extremely difficult to parse.

It's a wonder we ever manage to impart any useful information at all. My classroom is generally a bedlam of noise and miscommunication but the results are decent, so...

I go with neckbeard maestro William Empson: the language problem but we have to try.

Language is the source of misunderstandings

Interpretation is the source of misunderstandings

And everything we perceive is an interpretation.

the amount of info we can convey with language across even the noisiest channels should make you weep with joy each morning upon waking, it's probably one of the most amazing things in the entire universe. and all the various things people complain about are, for the most part, manifestations of an underlying playfulness that is essential to making language work as well as it does.

otm

Unnecessary stains upon silence and nothingness iirc.

if humans didn't have language, and therefore expressive silence, then the universe could not ignore itself

It would ignore itself passively rather than actively. A more consummate ignorance.

dude

Cats have expressive silence, imo