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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2218 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.

I always hated when I'd ask someone the time and they'd say "quarter til," "half past nine," "ten before din'," "twenty before honey," "forty-six before the shits," etc. Just tell me the fucking time, damn it.

This connects to a pet peeve I have, about social media companies all changing date formats to "1 hour ago," "5 hours ago," "1 day ago," "last year," etc. Usually there are ways to change it back, but often there aren't. Just give me the precise timestamp in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format and let me figure out when that was relative to now. Right now, on 11/11/2025, the knowledge that some comment was made on 11/4/2025 at 16:03 GMT means far more to me than the knowledge that it was made "last week" or even "1 week ago." Because I can far more easily cross-reference other events and comments around the time of that comment based on the former information than on the latter one.

It would be pretty funny if you were to submit a pull request to make such a change on this very website.

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