Irritating Inaccuracies

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I hear that acronym spoken from across the room fairly often. I'll glance over and see lots of pretty, sparkly colors all over his screen and he'll be telling folks what to do over his headset and suddenly he says, "stop DPS! stop DPS!"

I asked him once what that means and he gave me the non-gamer answer: "I'm telling them to stop doing damage." Now I know what it really means!

I didn't bother asking him what he meant when I told him his dinner was ready and he spoke into his headset, saying, "I have to go now. Avoiding domestic agro." It sounded like it might be unflattering toward me and after I'd just spent my valuable and limited time cooking him dinner, I figured I didn't want to know if it was something bad.

Language isn't static , and hence in a state of change . If I can understand the thought , pragmatically that's what I'm after.

On the other side of coin, if I find an error in something such as a 'misspelling' , as in an "MSN"news report , I will not finish reading the article .
If they didnt have "due care" in checking "that", in my mind who's to say that any of it is accurate.
My bias.

In this sense I'm concerned with my own grammar, as it has always been my weakness .
My handwriting is atrocious , and in school my written language skills have been found wanting.

I think entirely in pictures, and I have to 'translate it down' into a coherent thought , and I do feel as if I'm a perpetual foreigner dealing with the semantics and pragmatics of language .

Now that's one that I really wish wasn't done. That or, on another forum, "I'm BPD". Actually, that one even more so, since BPD is less a part of one's identity, thus, more important to differentiate between oneself, and having BPD, then it is with having AS.

person 1-"I'm nauseous".
person 2-"You certainly are".

I suppose this is the wrong place to complain about the way people keep going on about things that are obviously wrong but part of everyday life? Yes, I thought so.

I keep my rants internalized for the most part.

Most of the examples in this thread bug the crap out of me. Not because the "errors" annoy me. But because these are mostly situations where nearly everyone knows what's really being communicated. And if something is that comprehensible to that many people (or at least comprehensible within certain groups of people) then it's just as correct as the more standard and recognized forms of language. "Correct" is just a stand-in for "standard" or "dominant". And just because something's standard or dominant doesn't mean it's better than slang, dialect, common usage, etc. "That's me", "Me and my brother went to the store", lack of using (or "over"using) "whom", etc. just show that not every English speaker declines pronouns in the same way. People know perfectly well what's meant, and English is a living language that's constantly changing and that has many, many dialects and variations even within dialects.

And when it comes to spelling? Yes standardized spelling (like standardized grammar) can make things easier to understand for some people up to a point. But in the real world, English spelling was only standardized very recently in history. Read something from before that time and spelling varied not only depending on author, but even sometimes within the same work!

Anyway the biggest reason I've chosen not to be a grammar or spelling snob is because being like that makes it harder for speakers of nondominant dialects and people with impairments involving language or spelling. Which is a whole lot of people. (Including me, although I've been forced through school into somewhat more standard dialect than I started out. Something that I now find pretty offensive because it means I'm cut off from large parts of my family by language usage.)

You're right, a lot of examples are just every day use of stuff that most people understand. I don't fuss over my examples too much, but that doesn't make it any less annoying for me. Most people get the message, and this is also just one way languages evolve and words are formed. PUG itself in my example above is a word of its own now, not just an acronym, or not an acronym at all to some people.

As for other types of inaccuracies that aren't related to the above, I hate informational inaccuracies, especially about myself. I don't like people to think something about me that isn't true, even if it is extremely minor, because it is inaccurate. As I said, just about any inaccuracy annoys me, and I'm not going to remember details because I don't need to be further annoyed!

Agro (actually aggro (even more correct would be aggra!), short for aggravation), is a term in gaming to refer to a monster or bad guy in the game that has started to or is attacking you. I've never seen the term "domestic aggro" before but I know what he meant. It was a joke referring to you as "aggroing" him, and he wanted to avoid it. I wouldn't take offense from it.


Also, I have remembered one of my other annoyances that I see far too often! Reiterate! To iterate is to repeat. To reiterate is to re-repeat. To re-repeat is to iterate. They all mean the same things, really, except reiterate would have more emphasis on having to repeat something. In programming, we refer to a specific instance of a loop as an iteration. We often use "i" as a variable name to refer to the specific iteration! Anyway, the point of this is, a lot of people use reiterate when there wasn't a instance of repeating anyway. Meaning they are using it wrong. If they haven't iterated something yet, then there can be no reiteration.

I'm with you on that one. I recall an issue on a forum for a band I like, where one person got on my for correcting people. And he said not to correct something he posts. I said, if he doesn't want me to correct them, it's up to him to not post inaccurate information.

Someone else, by the way, complimenting me on my information correcting. Which surprised me. Because too many people just don't like being corrected. So, for someone to react by appreciating the effort for accuracy, rather then with defensiveness, that was cool.

But I wasn't being a monster or a bad guy. He asked me to make him food, so I did and I wasn't yelling at him to come eat it or anything, just telling him it was done. Then he told people I was a monster or a bad guy and just like you, I hate it when people say or think inaccurate things about me and it wasn't very nice to tell people I was a monster or a bad guy after I'd stopped what I was doing to go and make him food.

I figured it was something bad.

i can't stand this!! ! why don't people check to see whether something is accurate before forwarding it to everyone they've ever sent an email??? i always find it on snopes and send it back with an admonishment to 1. check for accuracy first, and 2. remove the email addresses of the recipients, as i'm convinced these idiotic mass email forwards are begun for the purpose of getting into spammers' hands with hundreds of addresses in them ...

and it drives me berzerk when signs and menus have punctuation or spelling errors. i can tolerate these kinds of things when people are writing quickly (or someone i know just has poor writing skills), but before something's published it should be edited.

BIG PET PEEVES:
irregardless instead of regardless - actually this one's in the dictionary, but i hate it anyway. (do they mean "irrespective"?)
nuclear pronounced "nucular" (worse if it's a US president saying it)
over-exaggerate



and i know it's ok, but i can't stand "myriad" used as an adjective.

and lastly .. apologies because i see it even in this thread, but when people use a semicolon but should have used a colon (for example, after "pet peeves" above). a colon suggests something follows: a list, or a related thought. a semicolon is for linking two complete thoughts that should be a little closer than separate sentences; each can stand on its own. (or for separating items in a list that would be confusing to distinguish otherwise)

Sparrowrose should really have explained that, as i'm no grammarian. and i'm sure something i'm doing is driving someone equally crazy. but i actually like when people correct me, so knock yourself out, whoever you are.



probably an aspie .. most people hate this sort of thing!

He'd take that as a compliment, I'd think.

He's, I'd say, not an NT, not an aspie, but a mysterious third type called the musician.

Here's one that irritates me.

People that confuse "verbal" and "vocal." This happens ALL the time. Even professionals seem to do it.

How is something nonverbal if it isn't spoken but involves words? If "verbal" were only spoken words, then every test taker at the SAT would be screwed on the "verbal" section given the "be quiet!" rule!