Comments on: I mind your language

By: Knox

Knox — Sun, 01 May 2011 22:08:40 +0000

Hmmm – reading this again, I have to admit I say ‘haitch’ and most Nigerians I know do too (and yes, they do tend to drop the ‘aitches’ at the beginning of words, but make up for it by adding it to the beginning of other words eg ‘e’s not going hanywhere’).

Spelling ‘too’ without the final ‘o’ – i cannot understand why this one is so difficult to grasp – i mean, you can even hear it by the way you say it, surely?

By: Seth

Seth — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:59:43 +0000

PIN Number. No, it’s a PIN. PIN is Personal Identification Number so PIN Number is Personal Identification Number Number.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 11 May 2010 11:31:21 +0000

If I didn’t think you were great already, the double whammy of “hubby” and “haitch” would have drawn me to that opinion. What no Haitch person has ever been able to tell me is why they don’t also think that the letter f is pronounced fef, the letter l lel, and so on. It’s the same logic.

By: Calum

Calum — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:12:30 +0000

Wasn’t “Sleb” a Private Eye invention? (I think we should be told.)

By: Richie

Richie — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:15:30 +0000

One that has sprung up in the last years and is spiralling out of control, especially in sports media circles, is ‘a big ask’. Where has it come from? Nowadays you rarely hear an interview with a footballer or manager where they don’t use that phrase at some point!

By: Steve

Steve — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 07:50:12 +0000

Please add SPROG, SPROGLET and similar to the hitlist.

By: Amy

Amy — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 01:08:36 +0000

If you ever ask if you can lend something off me, the answer is no. I will never let you have a lend of that dvd, any more than I will borrow it to you, until you learn to speak. That is all.

By: Julius

Julius — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:08:37 +0000

Nice post. (Nice is quite annoying isn’t it?). Read Bill Bryson’s Troublesome Words. Hundreds more mis-used words to get annoyed about.
I was once where you are….it gets worse before it gets better.
Most irritating (growled through clenched teeth) pregnancy phrase: “about to drop”.

By: Ed

Ed — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:57:19 +0000

“Flavourful”.

GAH! It’s “flavoursome” you STUPID ADVERTISING PEOPLE.

Also, “would you like to…” meaning “I want you to…”. It would be far more polite to just ask politely.

Also, and I appreciate that this doesn’t apply to every aspect of life, I can’t stand the term “historiography”, which basically means “checking your historical sources to make sure they’re not bollocks”, which you should do anyway and does not need its own word.

The the thing that REALLY makes me angry, however, is when adverts mispronounce foreign words, so that everyone in the country who watches them (apart from the minority who speak the language) pronounce it wrong for the rest of their lives. In ‘tagliatelle’ for example, the letters ‘gli’ contribute to make approximately the sound of ‘ly’, and in ‘chorizo’ there is NO LETTER ‘T’. In Spain the ‘Z’ sounds like the English ‘TH’ and in Latin America it sounds like an English ‘S’. I think it should be the law that adverts are pronounced correctly.

Oh and speaking of adverts, anti-aging cream adverts that go on about retinol. Do you know what retinol is? It’s Vitamin A. Eat some liver and carrots.

By: Daysieblue

Daysieblue — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:04:57 +0000

Literally hate it when people literally pepper their conversations with the word ‘literally’ literally every 5 seconds. I mean, it’s literally so annoying I literally want to literally kill them. Like literally.