Something I find cringeworthy is the growing use of words that don't mean what the author intended but work more or less. E.g. in Seveneves, Neal Stevenson uses the phrase "slatternly tarps". A slattern being a woman of dirty or untidy habit, it's hard to imagine a tarpaulin being particularly female. He probably meant slovenly, but thought the two were interchangeable or simply couldn't recall it (he's middle-aged, after all). Similarly, yesterday I read of someone "robbing the bottle cages" off his old bike. I always understood that you could rob a bank, a pillar-box or a person, but bottle cages and bullion you stole. Maybe robbing a bottle cage is OK in some dialects, but I think it's just wrong.