'The word pedants' top 10 | It's specific, not Pacific...' blog discussion.

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• i had something of this ilk in my signature and it was removed because someone obviously reported it to a mod. to this day i do not understand why.
  bought/brought is my number 1 word cock up hate
• Specific/Pacific
  A friend of mine once told me about a conversation he had with his son over the telephone. His son was at uni and had called to ask how to spell the word Pacific. What he meant was specific. His father tried to distinguish the word Pacific from specific but because his son was dyslexic and especially so with auditory short term memory his son was unable to process sounds accurately. He could hear perfectly but did not have the ability in his brain that most of us have that enables us to hear sounds, retain them as individual sounds and then put them together as words. He was loosing memory of the s by the time he arrived at the c.
  It was a sad phone call hence my friend recounting it to me. His son was extremely frustrated after years of being laughed at for not saying words properly.
• OK, as we're being pedantic, my pet hate is customers asking the person serving them in a shop or bar "can I get a coffee please?" (or whatever it is that you want them to pass over from their side of the counter.)
  "Can I have a coffee please?" is now pretty rare.
• Martin
  You have hit one of my most profound hates in the degradation of the English language. The use of the word "like" as punctuation; instead of commas and full stops - Aaaaaaaaaaaggghhh. Every time I point it out to my kids, they turn it on it's head and accuse me of not allowing the language to develop. You have certainly hit a nerve.
  The propensity for dropping T's in the communiee, or is it community, and yes I have taken lumps out of my tongue when sat in front of a very well educated young female client who insisted that her requirements were very 'pacific'. - Give me strength.
  Any ideas to help re-float this ship that has well and truly gone aground would be much appreciated.
• Thank you for posting this.
  Really.
  I'm a foreigner who loves the english language and hates to see it distorted in such nasty ways as your top 10.
  Note: I didn't know about the specific/Pacific confusion. Really? The world is worse than I thought
• Another word which grates on me: "women".
  No, it's not a sexist comment - it's the fact that some people don't know the difference between "woman" and "women". If someone refers to themselves as a "women" must mean they're large enough to be two (or more) people.
  The sales staff that ask me to enter my PIN number must be used to my facial expressions by now!
  For those who dislike "alot": https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.co...verything.html
• so glad my top hate made it into the list - lend and borrow!!
• oh, and the giving 110% is like, just kinda, basically, soooo annoying!!!
  although to be fair, I got really annoyed with a reporter on Radio 4 who kept insisting that something had been totally decimated - the definition of decimate is to reduce by 10% - so how can something be totally decimated? It would, in theory be possible to decimate what had previously been decimated, but this would always leave 90% intact after each 'decimation' making total decimation an impossibility.
• I should of like literally died 110% after I failed to brought a pacifically top rated cISA.
• I want to scream when I hear (usually Americans):
  "I could care less about ....."
  when it should be
  "I could'nt care less ...."
  If you could care less then it obviously isn't something to be that bothered over.
  Idiots.
• 'Can I go to the loo?'
  As my Teachers at school used to say 'I would hope you can, what you mean is 'May I go to the loo?'
  Febuary - it's FebRuary!!!
• My pet hate is "somethink" instead of "something". I'm absolutely amazed at the times I hear this on the television .
• Everyone in the whole, wide world seems to spell "lose" with two 'o's. Why is this? To loose something is an entirely different thing than to lose something!
  (But don't you often find that when you're being a grammar nazi and typing, you end up making a silly mistake yourself?)
• Two pet hates are "ask" pronounced "arks" and "quite unique".
  "Unique" means that there is only one of it, there are no degrees of "uniqueness", if there are two or more then its not unique. Nothing can be "very unique". Unique seems to have become a synonym for "rare".
• By the way, "cheap at half the price" makes no sense!