Out your closeted pedantry

OK so there are things about which I am pedantic, but I know it's futile or pathetic to pull people up about, so I have just decided to bottle my rage and let the world be wrong. Anyone else?
A few of my many examples:
- "methodology" is the study of methods, NOT a fancy word for "method" when you want to sound clever.
- "phenomena" is plural FFS
- "fewer" v "less" (this one hurts most I think)
- "within" is not a fancy word for "in" when you want to sound learned
AARGH

The 21st century began on January 1 2001

The plural of "vinyl" is "vinyl"

Do u say learn'd or learn-ed

its oph-thal-mology not op-tha-mology

still struggling to accept singular "they" for "he" or "she" in gender-neutral contexts

F-sharp I say "learn-ed" when it's an adjective, because I am.

Nice

rein not reign, had to restrain myself on ILX recently w/r/t this

still struggling to accept singular "they" for "he" or "she" in gender-neutral contexts

― Brad C., Monday, 20 March 2017 19:45 (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not to be pedantic but this is not a valid entry itt

dictionary would appear to differ wrt "methodology":

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/methodology

"a particular procedure or set of procedures"

xp I'm glad the controversy is over; to each the pronoun of their choice

Re dictionary suggestion, it seems like a usage-defined out. Much like "hopefully" is being redefined. If you're describing a procedure, the word is "method" - what does using "methodology" add, which isn't covered by the correct word?

Hyphens. No-one uses them properly.
Enjoy your locally-sourced gluten free meal in your pet free smoke free home *has aneurysm*

free-smoke

I've honestly never heard someone use "methodology" to mean "the study of methods". Is that a discipline-specific usage (philosophy??)?

i don't like when people say "doobage"

Huh, OED:

Originally: the branch of knowledge that deals with method generally or with the methods of a particular discipline or field of study; (arch.) a treatise or dissertation on method; (Bot.) †systematic classification (obs. rare). Subsequently also: the study of the direction and implications of empirical research, or of the suitability of the techniques employed in it; (more generally) a method or body of methods used in a particular field of study or activity.

Hm:

Originally: the branch of knowledge that deals with method generally or with the methods of a particular discipline or field of study; (arch.) a treatise or dissertation on method; (Bot.) †systematic classification (obs. rare). Subsequently also: the study of the direction and implications of empirical research, or of the suitability of the techniques employed in it; (more generally) a method or body of methods used in a particular field of study or activity.

Whoops:

The system of terms belonging to any science or subject; technical terms collectively; nomenclature. Also: the scientific study of the proper use of terms.

https://janiceheck.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/ped-xing.jpg

thing is theres more to words than lexicogaphy

yall just purists yo

but

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/methodology

yes, but the view of a true pedant, the corruption of perfect usage only becomes that much more intolerable when sanctioned by traitorous descriptivists

engineers I work w regularly incentivize the use of methodologies so in your face, everybody

not utilization?

for a long time I've wanted to call my memoir The Pedantry of the Closet.

not utilization?

deployment would also be acceptable

It just shits me when people think "oh there is a version of this word with three extra syllables, imma use that one to IMPRESS."
And no not a philosopher, neuroscientist / lecturer.

"Amount" vs "number", "that" vs "which". Really hate "you and I" in the objective case.

V niche but in Canadian politics, I have a hard time when people use "Red Tory" to mean "economic conservative, social liberal" (unless it's just my sister who does this), even though it is true that Red Tories in the historical sense barely exist in most of the country.

"economic conservative, social liberal"

(esp since this describes the Liberal government of 1993-2005 better than most members of the Conservative Party)

Also: "nasally" is an adverb, not a synonym for "nasal". (Even the author of the recording textbook I use does this!) For some reason, it seems to be becoming more common to use "however" as a mid-sentence conjunction, e.g. "The winter was cold, however, the landlord paid for our heating bill".

I'm not sure anyone should be described as a "socialist" unless they'd at least consider collectivizing the banks.

people calling every little cold they catch "the flu"

What about...Yknow...The flu we get and ye dont

Jeez you guys are like Cnut, the king who believed he could command the tides

my main one, remarkable mainly for its pettiness and for how doomed its cause is: you do not actually mean "deconstruct" when you say that. you mean "analyze" or some similar word. just because you're talking about something doesn't mean you're doing deconstruction and you probably don't know what deconstruction is/was.

this battle is lost of course (IRONY KALXON) , but cnut did NOT believe he could command the tides, he knew he couldn't -- he staged a demonstration to oily courtiers who insisted he could do anything, to show them he could not

I believe that was wins' point, if I can deconstruct his meaning for a moment.

agree with JCLC about that one too

IRONY KALXON (it tolls for thee)

I sometimes get pedantic about those hilarious Captain Pugwash characters who didn't in fact exist

I don't talk about "deconstruction" because I don't know what it is, and am ready and willing to continue not knowing, but I do have an idea of what "begging the question" is, unlike many people who use the phrase.

"was" in the subjunctive mood

The plural of "vinyl" is "vinyl"

"vinyl" is not a synonym for "record"

don't call them AnCo, ever

"phenomena" is plural FFS

see also: criteria

the belief that -ise is an acceptable British variant of -ize in verbs like "utilize"

yeah I am v pro -ize

can solve utilise vs utilize by using use, which is generally preferable to either

I don't talk about "deconstruction" because I don't know what it is, and am ready and willing to continue not knowing

it is important to use deconstruction to speak of mere disassembly (for instance, the way your mouth deconstructs the food you put in it), because it helps bury the other kind

They should just officially switch the definitions for disinterested and uninterested. I'm done fighting this fight.

Take a breather, champ. Not sure who you're fighting on this one.

Hillary voters iirc

/Yeah or like what you should do to Frankenstein, the monster comprised of corpse parts/

This bait did not snare anyone, I am disappoint.

Frankenstein was a feint, I was sure I would get someone with comprised

I don't care to find out what the deal with comprises/comprised is and will never use either probably

That is safe and wise.

Basically you can say "composed of" or "comprised," and they mean the same thing. "Comprised of" is seen as Very Wrong by many people.

I never use "comprised of." Not because I think it's a moral choice, or because it offends my delicate ears, but because I write for audiences and wish to accommodate the preferences of those audience members.

Well, that's what I say. Really, the only audience that matters is the person who signs my paycheck. And she doesn't want to see "comprised of," so it does not appear in my documentation.

I was going to type this:

Wait, "compriseS" would mean the same as "is composed of", surely? "Comprised of" just sounds like gibberish to me. No one really says that, do they?

But then I checked Apple's Oxford dictionary (both American and British) and it's right there:

comprise |kəmˈprʌɪz|
verb [ with obj. ]
consist of; be made up of: the country comprises twenty states.
• make up or constitute (a whole): this single breed comprises 50 per cent of the Swiss cattle population | (be comprised of) : documents are comprised of words.

I think 'is comprised of' is more forgivable than 'comprises of'

Here it's an estate agent thing, they all do it

Oh, well, that's just dumb. No one even says "composes of".

"Reactionary" does not mean "impulsive" or anything like that, look it up bitch

I sometimes hear people use this to mean "provoking a strong reaction", which is very reactionary for me.

OH. It's pronounced 'car-a-mel'. I can mostly deal wrt lay people, but when I hear folks on cooking shows say 'carmel' and 'carmelize' I plotz.

Definitely a regional thing for the noun, for the verb, "car-a-mel-ize" actually strikes me as a bit more unusual

Oh, yeah, the incorrect version is definitely more commonly used. This is apparently only a problem for my pedantic ears.

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IR9khqut2x4/VwRlQEzwNTI/AAAAAAABLDY/sKz9ZntZUsYSkaFoH6UKm3QJfV1DmTXSg/s1600/12512358_758438437625938_6466270805309255795_n.jpg

This is sort of an interesting one and we're getting into ILM territory: would you call Deep Purple a heavy metal band, for instance? Bon Jovi? (Casey Kasem called them heavy metal in 1986.) Current bands who sound like those bands?

― My Body's Made of Crushed Little Evening Stars (Sund4r), Saturday, March 25, 2017 10:02 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thought about this one. with hair bands, I feel like many "hair metal" bands weren't actually metal, though it was possible to be a hair band and be metal (like early Crue and all W.A.S.P.). I also don't think that Bon Jovi being more pop-oriented would inherently make it not metal either. I think I don't consider Bon Jovi metal not for that reason but that I just feel they're more in line with hard rock, though they teetered on the edge naturally.

Deep Purple I personally wouldn't but I don't object to those who do.

I wouldn't know how to start defining metal vs. hard rock. I am currently trying to make sense of a landscape where Americana, countrypolitan, Ameripolitan, rockabilly, honky-tonk, jive, jump, and psychobilly are all distinct and zealously defended categories. Lots of it sounds to my ear like what we used to call "alt-country" (or even "country rock") but for some reason that isn't the term preferred by the twangnoscenti.

Accents is another one. Drives me mad when people write Brotzmann rather than Brötzmann, for example.

Dude. Diacriticals.

Diacritic is primarily an adjective, though sometimes used as a noun, whereas diacritical is only ever an adjective.

OUCH

Now come on, who's got time for diacritics when they're trying to keep up with a huge rolling countdown thread. Fucked if I'm gonna remember the shortkey for all those off the top of my head. Brotzmann is is.

The panic I went through on the Talking Heads poll images to use "naïve" or - as it's used on the actual record label - "naive".

Went with the latter because I didn't know what my stupid postcard font would do with a command like that.

I recall a fun exchange here about The New Yorker's infamous dedication to a certain diacritical mark. Dr. Morb wondered why the New Yorker doesn't think we can understand the word "reelect" without an umlaut, and jaymc retorted, "It's a diaeresis, fool."

O wait I found it

the most important election of your lifetime: 2012 american general election thread

Sigh,, o for the days when I felt like Mitt Romney was a dangerous political enemy.

Fucked if I'm gonna remember the shortkey for all those off the top of my head. Brotzmann is is.

― Lennon, Elvis, Hendrix etc (dog latin), Thursday, April 6, 2017 9:26 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm

anagram u crazy

itt http://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/scalefit_630_noupscale/58e345dc1500002100c7dc2b.jpeg?cache=ct2yeuuynn

ö is alt+0246 on a windows keyboard. It takes a second and once you're used to it, it comes as second nature. Besides which, ö is actually a different letter from o, so not to use it is actually spelling the name wrong, which is kind of disrespectful imo.

ñ / Ñ is also very much its own letter (and you will see it that way on Spanish alphabet-related materials for children).

I'm on a laptop mostly so the alt-xxxx combinations are less instinctive, but I agree that Señor is a different case than "reëlect."

ö is alt+0246 on a windows keyboard. It takes a second and once you're used to it, it comes as second nature.

When I email with Mexican relatives in Spanish, they rarely use any accent marks. (And pretty much never use upside down exclamation or question marks at the beginning of sentences.)

Must be confusing when they mention your niece has 16 anos.

How does Broetzmann grab you?

Must be confusing when they mention your niece has 16 anos.

While examples of this type of thing abound, people in any language are able to understand homonyms and homophones from context. If someone says "good night," I don't wonder whether they're talking about Sir Paul McCartney.

They're not talking about Jimmy Savile.

I regularly read notes charted about my daughter that say she slept "threw out the night" and similar stuff. Doesn't really bother me that much.

Y'all are pretty easygoing about these things for some pedants.

They do use ñ, probably b/c it's a single keystroke. I try to avoid the word año any way I can.

When I email with Mexican relatives in Spanish, they rarely use any accent marks. (And pretty much never use upside down exclamation or question marks at the beginning of sentences.)

Surely they wouldn't have to use Alt codes on Spanish keyboards and OS?

my uncle has definitely wished me a happy new anus

Actually, I'm trying to learn how to closet my autist pedantry, when appropriate. I wonder what's left of me without it.

fwiw, in Office apps, Insert > Symbol works without requiring one to memorize alt codes or keep a table of them at hand. If you need them a lot, a reasonably savvy person can define a keyboard shortcut, or get fancy and create a macro.

(And not to flagellate a deceased equine, "left" as in the direction and "left" as in "gone" is possibly a better example than "night"/"knight")

for a long time I've wanted to call my memoir The Pedantry of the Closet.

― the Rain Man of nationalism. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 20, 2017 4:38 PM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

by Eve Kosofsky Soto

Or résumé and resume.

Recently, I'd been procrastinating starting a work project. The client sent me an email that read:

"Puffin, Jesus,

What are the next steps for this project? It’s been 3 working days and I haven’t seen any progress yet."

I was a little flustered by the brusque tone. But nevertheless I scrambled into frenzied action, doing as much as I could in half an hour or so, and sent out the resulting draft.

Then I looked a little closer at the e-mail.

It wasn't sent only to me; it was also sent to a subject-matter resource, Jesus Garcia Lopez.

So it wasn't "Puffin: Jesus Christ, man! What the fuck will it take for you to get this thing started?", as I had taken it.

It was more like "Puffin (and) Jesus: What are the next steps?"

better get with Jesus

haha

I've said this a thousand times on here, but I'll say it again. My IRL name is Tre. Not Tré, like the guy from Green Day, but simply Tre - the Italian word for "three". And I get very irrationally angry when someone tries to add that accent mark to my name. Would rather be called Trey than that.

But with or without the accent, at least my name doesn't change context and pronunciation like poor Jesús'.

guy at work is called jesus

i call him jesus christ superstar

yeah there was a time where I got an email that said "Neanderthal, Asshole, when am I going to see the assignment I gave you three weeks ago" and then I spent two hours searching the company directory for Asshole before I realized he was insulting me

<3 that jesus story