Grammar that makes you cringe

[T42]

I've a feeling we're past peak awesome, but that's maybe because I no longer work with the same set of awesome  dudes that I worked with 5 years ago.  I was sorrunded by it then and started, for my private amusement, to record each instance I heard. I decided to stop after this exchange:

- It's my nan's birthday next week
- Awesome!

The peak of the recent epidemic was back in 2003 according to Google's Ngrams, but there was a bigger peak in 1989. Trouble is, it takes six months to develop a vaccine for the current strain and, since they use eggs to do so, vegans can't have it.

[ian]

My previous boss (and all round nice chap) was called Awesome George on account of his ability to enthuse any and every sentence with 'awesome.'

[Cudzoziemiec]

I think 'super' as a prefix to just about any adjective is the new awesome.

–It's my nan's birthday next week.
–Hope she has a super-good day!

–My canary died.
–You must be super-upset.

etc.

[Kim]

I've a feeling we're past peak awesome, but that's maybe because I no longer work with the same set of awesome  dudes that I worked with 5 years ago.  I was sorrunded by it then and started, for my private amusement, to record each instance I heard. I decided to stop after this exchange:

- It's my nan's birthday next week
- Awesome!

The peak of the recent epidemic was back in 2003 according to Google's Ngrams, but there was a bigger peak in 1989. Trouble is, it takes six months to develop a vaccine for the current strain and, since they use eggs to do so, vegans can't have it.

Duck eggs presumably.  I thought that - other than a brief resurgence associated with the recent Lego movie - 'awesome' went out with Edd The Duck.  Or was displaced by 'mega' at the turn of the 90s.  Or something.


I've been immunised against 'super', on account of always reading it in the tone of Olivia from Dark Season.  (Older readers can substitute with Reggie Perrin's colleagues.)

[Pickled Onion]

I pray to $Deity that I should never again have to hear someone use the term 'literally' when it literally is not, like literally, like relevant. In Estuary . . .

Sorry if we've like, literally done this before. Literally . . .

Too late, literally now literally does mean not literally: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/literally A fine example of defining a word using the word you're defining 

[Cudzoziemiec]

Niblings.

Languages like Spanish and French are fine with using a masculine plural to simply call the whole lot ‘nephews’ (sobrinos and neveux, respectively) – although some people are calling for a rethink of this approach at the moment. At one time, this might have been acceptable in English, too, but try it now and you’re likely to experience a fair amount of outrage from your little niece Trixabelle.

There have been a couple of suggestions to fill this gap, but they haven’t made it into the dictionary yet. ‘Niblings’ appears to be the most popular, like siblings with an ‘n’ for nieces and nephews. Several people claim to have invented this word, but it appears to have been first used by a linguist named Samuel E. Martin in 1951. A few fans use the term – I actually heard somebody mention their niblings last Christmas.

Personally, though, I find it a bit odd. Your nephews and nieces aren’t really comparable to your siblings (even if they look like them). They’re a different generation, for one thing. So ‘niblings’ doesn’t feel like a good fit to me.

https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2018/01/22/nibling-nieces-nephews-collective-term/

Personally I think it has quite a nice sound to it. But never mind a different generation, it sounds like something small to eat; party snacks, maybe? "I'll have some more of these niblings, they're delicious!"

[T42]

Sounds like Nibelung.

[Mr Larrington]

Did TV's Christian Fraser really just say that "last week President TЯump offered the fig leaf to the Democrats"?

[hellymedic]

Not knowing a fig leaf from an olive branch suggests confusion of biblical botanical metaphors.
Is that grammar?

Certainly is IGNORANT!

[ian]

I'm just hoping that was a figurative and not a literal fig leaf. That's not a sight you'll come back from.

[clarion]

GOD HATES FIGS!!!

Matt 21:19

[Cudzoziemiec]

Take the hilly city of Seattle, where several neighbourhoods have no pavements at all, and many streets have a slope grade (or tilt) of 10% or even 20%.

Alternatively, they have an incline, pitch or gradient. Maybe the writer is paid, remunerated or salaried by the word?

[Guy]

 

There are no automatic promotion boards, by enlarge it’s an annual occurrence that by the end of the...

[citoyen]

That sign you often see on the back of lorries:

"CYCLISTS! Do not pass this vehicle on the inside."

Well, I wouldn't even try to do that - not while the doors are closed.

Has the traditional term "nearside" fallen entirely out of currency?

Or, even better:
"CYCLISTS! Do not pass this vehicle on the left."

[ian]

Yes, it has.

And some of us, contorted into a spatial dimension where things are mostly confusionwards, don't know left and right. I have no idea unless I'm writing and I check which hand (and I spent a good portion of my life unsure why hand to use – right is less smudgy – even if, according to my handwriting, it belongs to a girl, and if it does, she's not having it back, and for those of you at the back thinking of such matters, please stop it, she's not that kind of girl).

Inside is right. Or left. Oh fuck.

[citoyen]

And some of us, contorted into a spatial dimension where things are mostly confusionwards, don't know left and right.

Fair point. My wife's trick is to hold her hands out in front of her, palms facing down, fingers pointing forwards, thumbs pointing towards each other. The hand that makes an L shape is the left, the one that makes a backwards L shape is not the left. If I'm ever giving her directions, I don't say "turn right" or "turn left", I say "turn your side" or "turn my side".

[Cudzoziemiec]

I saw a good version of that sticker on a lorry the other day. Instead of instructing anyone to do anything, it said "Beware, blind spot".

[Feanor]

And some of us, contorted into a spatial dimension where things are mostly confusionwards, don't know left and right.

Fair point. My wife's trick is to hold her hands out in front of her, palms facing down, fingers pointing forwards, thumbs pointing towards each other. The hand that makes an L shape is the left, the one that makes a backwards L shape is not the left. If I'm ever giving her directions, I don't say "turn right" or "turn left", I say "turn your side" or "turn my side".

It's not unknown for Mrs F to say "Turn Left!"
Then I turn Right.

But that was actually what she meant, and both of our mix-ups cancelled out.

Others in the car looked puzzled, but it's fairly normal for us.
If it looks like the driver might be going the wrong way, they might say "No, the OTHER Left!"

[Tim Hall]

Yes, it has.

And some of us, contorted into a spatial dimension where things are mostly confusionwards, don't know left and right. I have no idea unless I'm writing and I check which hand (and I spent a good portion of my life unsure why hand to use – right is less smudgy – even if, according to my handwriting, it belongs to a girl, and if it does, she's not having it back, and for those of you at the back thinking of such matters, please stop it, she's not that kind of girl).

Inside is right. Or left. Oh fuck.

I thought that was just me. See also traffic reports for the M25. "J10 on the clockwise carriageway" Wha?

[Moleman76]

I saw a good version of that sticker on a lorry the other day. Instead of instructing anyone to do anything, it said "Beware, blind spot".

I've seen "If you can't see my mirror, I can't see you".  Now, whether or not the driver will look into the mirror ...

[nicknack]

I've seen "If you can't see my mirror, I can't see you".  Now, whether or not the driver will look into the mirror ...

The pedant in me always wants to change that to, "If you can't see my mirror, I can't see your eyes".

[Mr Larrington]

Terminally unimaginative and/or lazy writers on the kind of webby news aggregator site who use the phrase or saying "X is taking the internet by storm!!1!".

No.  No, it is not.  Stop being wrong.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Every lexicographer I spoke to made clear their distaste for “word-lovers”, who in the dictionary world are regarded as the type of person liable to scrawl “fewer” on to supermarket signs reading “10 items or less”, or recite “antidisestablishmentarianism” to anyone who will listen.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/23/oxford-english-dictionary-can-worlds-biggest-dictionary-survive-internet

[mattc]

That sign you often see on the back of lorries:

"CYCLISTS! Do not pass this vehicle on the inside."

Well, I wouldn't even try to do that - not while the doors are closed.

Has the traditional term "nearside" fallen entirely out of currency?

Or, even better:
"CYCLISTS! Do not pass this vehicle on the left."

I hope "nearside" does die out. I know this marks me out as a road-user simpleton, but I have NEVER understood the term; I don't find it intuitive, and it's a word that isn't used in any other context (that I know of). Whereas "left" is quite widely used in Anglophone countries, by non-drivers, children etc.

Tip for Ian et al; "Left" is the side of the road that Brits drive on - that's how to remember it. HTH!

(and why not hang/write an "L" somewhere inside your car? If this lack of a skill f*cks up your driving/navigating so badly, a cheap fix seems worthwhile. Just sayin ... )

[Kim]

Nearside and offside are occasionally useful technical terms, when you're talking about the construction or operation of vehicles and need to be agnostic about which side of the road people are driving on.  But in real life I just use left and right.

But I say that as someone who has no problem with left and right, cardinal directions, or indeed other people's (or the stage's) left and right.  Other people's brains work differently^[1], and we fail as communicators if we don't allow for that.  It hadn't really occurred to me that people might find nearside and offside less confusing than left and right, but I do recall an account of someone who had internalised 'left' as "easy turn" and 'right' as "complicated turn" and became unable to follow directions as soon as they drove in ABROAD.


_{[1] Barakta, for example, occupies some middle ground where she's fine with her own left and right, but has no sense of cardinals and needs to use heuristics to give directions for another person's perspective.  Her mum's at the other extreme and needs to do a little morris dance on the steering wheel every time to work out which way is 'left'.}