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With the big stuff I can gird my loins and soldier through. However, like a pebble in my shoe, there are petty pet peeves that just make me grind my teeth and wish to rip the face off the offender. Come sit beside me and share yours. We’ll plot murder and mayhem.
YEEEEAAARGH!! When did this humble adverb with a straight-forward meaning become a rhetorical decoration to embellish the strength of a statement? “When I saw what she did, I literally died from laughter.” Um, you’re still on the sunny side of the grass, darling.
Your year didn’t totally suck – your kids stayed out of juvie, you had enough money to cover that unfortunate toilet incident and you actually got to go on vacation for a week. Tent camping in the closest state park to home. Then you get that Christmas letter. You want to be happy for your friend’s great year. But as she sighs about the huge hassle the family went through on getting their cell phones compatible for their summer trip to Paris and listening to her kids gripe about spotty wi-fi in Provence, you have to suppress an urge to drive over and salt their new sod lawn.
I live in Southern California, but from what I hear, this is basically one of those universal peeves. Traffic is bad enough without some hag-born pignut driving below the speed limit in the left lane! I usually don’t work much in profanity, but even I run out of words to describe the circumstances of birth, the general appearance and intelligence of the moron in front of me who will not move over! Grrrrrrrrrrr……!
Don’t say “Ok, Boomer” or I’m going to shuffle over to you in my walker and whack you upside the head with my rolled up copy of Feisty Codgers. Time to face reality … unless you are a widely wealthy musician, a hairdresser with no future ambitions, or part of a biker gang, that 666 on your forehead, the line of rings along your eyebrows, or the split tongue just doesn’t say “I’m going to make a great addition to your accounting firm!”
Here we are on New Year’s Eve and I can’t relax and mosey around social media without stumbling over another smugger-than-thou argument that 2020 is not really the start of the next decade, it’s really the end of the one that started in 2011.
Come closer, sweetheart. This is for you.
I could probably ramble on until next New Year’s Eve. But there is a bottle of chilled bubbly, a warm hubby and a soft couch for canoodling awaiting my attention. May your New Year’s Eve find you in a celebratory mood and may next year bring you happiness and joy.
And fewer pebbles in your shoe. L’Chaim!
Kate says: Let’s see a painfully quick death for these words!
Bae.
Adulting.
Clap back.
Kim Hirsch says: Yes. And I would add “at the end of the day. . .”
Mustang says: Honorable mention for the glottal stop please? Or is that glah-uhl stop?
GWB says: It’s part of a bunch of languages, likely some of whose words we have borrowed. You want all those people to stop speaking their languages properly?
GWB says: The decade starts tomorrow.
The millennium started on the “1” year.
The two do not have to line up.
And, my prediction for the very first meme of 2021:
“Hindsight is 2020”
You heard it here first!
GWB says: salt their new sod lawn
It’s newly. And make sure you do it in an appropriate shape.
Slow Drivers, Wrong Lane
Yes. This is actually my #1. I am trying to be a better Christian about it, but, sweet Jesus, it is really hard.
it’s really the end of the one that started in 2011
Well, in one sense, yes. I mean you don’t have to count decades strictly in accord with some rule. One of my decades started in 1984. And a lot of the things associated with “a decade” will probably not start until 2021 or 2024, or even 2027. Woodstock “defined the 60s” but it didn’t happen until the end.
So, people are right, but wrong because they’re sanctimonious about it and telling you that you’re wrong.
Feel free to whack them with your noisemaker, but please refrain from the bottle-rocket-up-the-bum level of punishment.
People who nitpick the grammar in a bit of writing for which they paid not one red cent?
(Runs away, while calling over his shoulder: “Happy New Year – New Decade – New Tens – whatever floats your boat!)
silverpie says: On “literally,” you’re not alone—it also made this year’s Banished Words List.
Gee, no one ever seems to notice my pet lexical peeve: “on a XXX basis” instead of the simple “XXXly.”
This allergy about using adverbs is insane. Adverbs have never hurt anyone! (Well, all right, there was that one time in Latin class, but hey.) (:-)
GWB says: So you would not be ok with “on a literal basis”?
*runs*
[…] 5 Pet Peeves I Wish Would Disappear in 2020 […]
CaptDMO says: L’Chiam Y’All (adopted that in Texas), Mazeltov, and Shalom.
I’m not Jewish, so no “Next year in Jerusalem” from me.
OldTexan says: About those slow pokes who just set their cruise control on the speed limit and poke along in the left lane, here in Texas, there are those of us who drive full size pickup trucks who have been appointed to pull up within a foot or two of their rear bumper and fill their mirrors until the move on up and over. Since I am old and have one of the smaller full size trucks I usually leave to the younger folks with their giant 4WD, 3/4 or 1 ton trucks, about every other pickup in my part of Texas, to lead the way and tuck in behind them.
On the way to Port Aransas for Christmas with kids and grandkids it was pleasant to drive along the 75mph highway at 80 and 85, with everyone trying to keep things moving, On the two hundred mile trip I only saw the left lane blocked up a couple of times by funny little people, driving funny little cars just chugging along in the left lane at a slow 70 to 75 mph. Texans, doing what we can to keep the traffic moving.
Tom says: Pet Peeves: #3 – Slow Drivers, Wrong Lane
What will peeve you even more is that many of those slow drivers in the left lane are doing it ON PURPOSE.
They think the speed limit is actually a limit and not merely a suggestion and therefore it is their duty to slow you down. They don’t care or maybe even realize that they are the ones who are breaking the law (in many states) by impeding traffic.
The best solution is to pass ’em on the right (legal in my state) at the earliest opportunity and get on down the road.
Ann in L.A. says: There is a commercial running these days that is the flip-side of #1: a company is advertising that it can “virtually eliminate your credit card debt!” But I don’t want it virtually eliminated: I want it literally eliminated!
GWB says: LOL! Exactly!
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