English Language Pet Peeves

My Top Five Pet Peeves regarding people's abuse of the English Language:


#1 – “Literally” in place of “Figuratively”. “I literally crawled over broken glass to get here.” The original meaning of the word has been completely reversed in the colloquial sense. People now use it for the literal opposite of the word’s definition.

#2 – ‘Supposebly’ and ‘Ostensively’. Mispronunciation is a common aspect of the English language, but the words ‘Supposedly’ and ‘Ostensibly’, specifically the pronunciation of these two words, have produced two words that do not exist, and I hear even the most educated people using the mispronounced forms.

#3 – “Would of.”  “I would of been lost if I hadn’t read the map.” In a bizarre progression of this phrase, the term ‘would have’ was contracted into “Would’ve” and then un-contracted based on the pronunciation to ‘would of’.

#4 – “K” – the text abbreviation of two letters (“OK”) to just one, because somehow that is a time/effort saver.

#5 – “Tolerance”. In the past twenty years the term ‘tolerance’ has come to be redefined as more than just simple acceptance of something or someone that had differing political views or a lifestyle that seemed socially or morally unacceptable. Now it seems that ‘tolerance’ has come to mean something closer to ‘condoning’ or ‘approval.’

PS Share with the rest of us your own pet peeves in the comments below!