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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   920 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 7, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Much ink has been spilled here over the dreaded em-dash and other hallmarks of AI writing. But what other linguistic pet peeves do you have?

I ask because I just found myself fuming over the widespread confusion between "jealousy" and "envy." People tend to use them as synonyms (more often simply using jealousy for both terms), but the two words describe emotions that I think deserve to be distinguished. Jealousy is felt over things that rightfully belong to you, while envy is felt over things which do not. God is jealous; you are envious. Being jealous is still generally bad, but it's nowhere near as bad as envy. As a child who was bad at sharing but generally pretty good about being happy about the good fortune of others, it has always bothered me how few people seem to grasp the distinction.

Oh man I have several.

  • "I could care less"
  • "For all intensive purposes"
  • Misuse of "literally" to mean "figuratively"
  • Saying "an homage". My brother in Christ, the first sound in "homage" is an H, not a vowel. You should say "a homage". Technically this one is more the mispronunciation of "homage" than the grammar rule being used wrongly

All of those get under my skin quite a bit. I just ignore it because nobody likes a grammar Nazi to correct them, but they do annoy me.

1 and 3 bother me much more than any of the others, because they actually mean literally the opposite of what you said. If you say "for all intensive purposes" it's basically clear what you mean. Language gradually drifting, or people using casual slang is tolerable in bits and pieces, because you're still effectively communicating. Multiplying by -1 and saying the opposite of what you meant to say is just confusing nonsense, and hinders the ability of people to know what your words mean. If the word "literally" means literally 50% of the time and means figuratively 50% of the time then people have to deduce the meaning entirely from context, in which case the word provides no signal whatsoever.

Similarly, I know the word "inflammable" is hundreds of years old, but it's still a bad word because it hinders the ability to easily refer to objects which are not flammable.

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