When did "Medireview" = Medieval???

[Marius Delphus]

It's Spelled "Curmudgeon"

Don't forget the classic regardless and irregardless <nails on chalkboard>

Quite so. This is less a peeve than a shoot-on-sight offense with me, of course, but it does bear mentioning. What makes this one particularly annoying is that my copy of MS Word does not mark the "ir-" version as an error. After the first couple of victims, people around the office here started double-checking that one.

Just for fun, a few more. Discuss.

Architect (as a verb; may be losing this battle)
Automagically (gachk)
Discreet/discrete (yes, they're different)
Guesstimate (gachk)
Mute/moot (proof that words both spelled AND pronounced differently can be confused)
Per se (oh, what creative misspellings I've seen of this one)
Peak/peek/pique (you'd be surprised)
Pore/pour (you never "pour" on something you want to examine)
Rain/rein/reign (roll a d6÷2 and pick one? what?)
Sheer/shear (is it really that difficult?)
Task (as a verb meaning "assign a task to")
Transition (as a verb; definitely losing this battle)

I lean more toward the grammarian in my own writing and in the workplace. I couldn't care less (NOTE: "couldn't") what other people do in casual writing, as long as I can understand what's being said.

 

[painandgreed]

I can't pass up the opportunity to ring in with a couple of my own, from the corporate world:

Using the tilde (~) to mean "approximately"

Common in math and physics classes because they use the double tilde (or whatever it's called) instead of an equal sign for approximation but there is not a double tilde on the typewriter.

The Medireview thing has already been explained as the substitution of eval for review to prevent scripts. I can say that it has become a replacement because I have used it. In creating website for bands at the german music fesitval Wave-Gotik-Treffen, I kept seeing the term "medireview' for the various bands. I figured it was just some new term for some modern medieval influenced music, so I started using it. only years later did I find out what it was, due to a German website that pointed towards mine as an example of where "medireview" had popped up on the web at.

 

[Zweihänder]

This is the way a lot of people pronounce the word, so it's as valid and correct as any other way. (If you couldn't tell, I'm hardly a prescriptionist when it comes to language. )

Just because a hundred thousand people make the same mistake, that does not make their mistaken answer valid!!! Widespread stupidity is still stupidity!

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

It's a bug in Yahoo mail and in Plastic.

And "nukular" isn't a grammar issue - it's just a pronounciation issue. The word's grammatical use doesn't change depending on how you pronounce it. Complaining about it is like complaining that the k in "knight" is silent, unlike in the good old days of "proper" Middle English.

However, quotes should never, never be used simply for emphasis, unless you want to look like an idiot. That's what italics are for. One of the things, anyway.

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

Here's some more information on the bug. It's supposed to protect people from malicious JavaScript.

 

[Bagpuss]

Psst... that news article is 3 years old...

Does that make my statement any less true?

 

[CronoDekar]

I wasn't going to add anything to this thread since I'm more of a descriptionist myself, but there's one thing that's recently been bugging me a lot. That is, misuse of the phrase "negative reinforcement."

Negative reinforcement is NOT punishment! It's reinforcement in which, rather than giving a reward, you remove an adverse condition (such as pain, or sitting in timeout). Punishment is called "punishment!"

Just because a hundred thousand people make the same mistake, that does not make their mistaken answer valid!!! Widespread stupidity is still stupidity!

That may be true for more concrete things like physics or math, but these are just arbitrary sounds coming out of our mouths

 

[Marius Delphus]

Common in math and physics classes because they use the double tilde (or whatever it's called) instead of an equal sign for approximation but there is not a double tilde on the typewriter.

True, but I don't find there's much excuse for it in running text in a business proposal, where I think it looks vapid and unprofessional. This is especially true in a font where the tilde is elevated above the x-height of the text.

"This new monitoring device offers a real-time sampling rate of ~60 readings per minute."
"Our personnel have ~24,000 hours of combined experience supporting projects..."

Also, ditto Zweihänder AND CronoDekar, because I have different priorities regarding spoken language (I'm less of a jerk about speech, for one thing). This is why it's become useful to grammarians to call something they agree with "standard" and something they don't "nonstandard" instead of "right" and "wrong"; that way, "they don't offend nobody."

Also, my Yahoo mail has been set to send plain text ever since I got the silly thing, and now I know not to plan on changing my mind.

 

[Rogue765]

Just because a hundred thousand people make the same mistake, that does not make their mistaken answer valid!!! Widespread stupidity is still stupidity!

One person pronouncing a word wrong is a mistake. A million people pronouncing it wrong is a dialect.

 

[painandgreed]

True, but I don't find there's much excuse for it in running text in a business proposal, where I think it looks vapid and unprofessional. This is especially true in a font where the tilde is elevated above the x-height of the text.

Yes, standard math often looks vapid and unprofessional to MBAs. One must always be sure to dumb down everything you say to a business major or they'll fire you for using the word "pedagogical".

Remember, dictionaries are lists of how people use words, not how words should be used. You speak the way you do only due to the "stupidity" of earlier generations and unless you're French, there is no official body that states how words or grammar have to be used.