Poll: Are you an obnoxious pedant?

I just saw hkath describe herself as "an obnoxious pedant." Are you one? I know I am. I bet there are lots of us here. If you don't believe I'm one just try pronouncing "Perseus" with three syllables in my hearing.

Umm... Per-see-us isn't the correct pronunciation?

Tee Hee

I knew someone would go for the bait and I'd get to be pedantic.

It is Per-soos. Think of it this way the king of the greek gods is Zeus, one syllable. Perseus is the same language so all you do is change the z to an s and put a per in front of it.

The three syllable pronunciation grew out of confusion with the common Latin name ending "ius"

The only people I've ever heard pronounce it correctly are my mythology professor, who corrected me, and professional astronomers who are probably the people who say the name the most as it is the name of a constellation.

tee hee indeed. I first read that as "I'd get to be pediatric." Despite the fact that I knew what the thread title was.

Which shows that I'm not only an obnoxious pedant, but a scatterbrain too. :P

Tell me about it. I've been thinking about this all morning. Why is it that telling someone they've misused an apostrophe is such a horrible, insulting thing to do, while informing them that their fly is undone is such a service? I mean, you don't get angry at the person that tells you your zipper's down. In both scenarios they were in an unconsciously embarrassing situation which I've given them the opportunity to rectify.

I'm thinking of starting to use "your fly's open" as a blanket opening phrase relating to all grammar, punctuation and syntax issues that I feel need to be addressed. Of course, then I'd be mean *and* crazy.

I love you.

hee!
awesome. :)

I get somewhat flustered when I hear people intermingle Greek and Roman names in mythology. When you're discussing Greek mythology, you really should use the name Heracles.

That's just one example.

I was just thinking about that the other day. There is irony in using Heracles because it means Glory of Hera, and she was his nemisis.

The one thing I can't bring myself to do is pronounce the guys iwth one eye Kyklops. That is really right, there is no soft C in greek. The better translations even spell it that way.

What's the plural of Cyclops? It's Cyclopes, right? How is that pronounced?

If that is hte correct plural, It would be pronounced KI-Klo-Pees

There are so many greek plurals I don't know which applies here. I do know that the plural of octopus is either octopodes or octopuses. Octopi is just wrong.

dwd, if you're going to be an obnoxious pedant about Greek mythology, you ought to spell Nemesis properly.

*ducks*

I can't type/spell english right, you expect me to do better in Greek?

But spelling is my pedantic specialty!

I'm always shocked to discover a word I don't know how to spell.

If you're allowed to correct how I pronounce "Perseus" (or "pedant" for that matter :D ) then I think I can be a spelling Nazi. :D

That's too harsh. You can be the spelling Fascist, but not the spelling Nazi.

Yeah... comparing anyone to a Nazi is overkill... this is hardly an issue as important as soup.

I didn't need any convincing.

But, in my job, there are lots of opportunities to be one.

It seems that I work in an office full of people who assume that the fact that they've spell-checked a document means that no further attention need be paid to it.

You're/Your, Their/They're, and Affect/Effect are just a few of the errors recently in publications or Powerpoint Presentations what have made my hair stand up. In particular, that affect/effect thing, since I only recently got that straight in my own head.

A lot depends on what kind of emotional space I'm in at the moment I encounter whatever it is I can get all pedanty about.

Oh, and I just thought of this: This is one area of my life where the "treat others as I'd like to be treated" thing goes right out the window. My first instinct was to post a langthy trestise about how M-W lists the pronunciation with which I'm familiar as correct, as well.

Pedantry is a lot like assholes, I guess.

I think the setting is important in considering whether or not to make a correction. Here it wouldn't be proper, the writing is informal. Iam also sensitive because I constantly make errors in all the homonyms. I know which their/there/they're is correct but which one comes out of my fingers is pretty much decided at random. Hell I had to be really careful just now to not write "witch one." The other thing is corrections should be made when possible on one one not in public.

The other thing is corrections should be made�when possible on one one not in public.

But public humiliation is so much fun!

The one that drives me most nuts is accept/except, mainly because the meanings are so different, and they are pronounced differently, if you say them correctly.

I adore homonyms that mean the exact opposite of each other, such as "raise" and "raze". Hee.

or cleave and cleave

a truly sublime example. :)

Why thank you! :)

and my favorite type of person to correct...

the obnoxious pedant :)

i figure, if you're going to correct someone, especially publicly--you'd better damn well be right yourself.

Which reminds me of the "politically correct pedant." Someone asked me where to buy some fruit and I said, "the oriental grocery." She said, "You shouldn't say oriental, the word is Asian." I told her to take that up with the Korean family that owned the store since named it "the oriental grocery."

I got into an argument with an obnoxious pedant who insisted that "orientate" wasn't a word. He insisted that the word was "orient." He's actually wrong a lot for an obnoxious pedant...

Isn't "orientate" primarily used in British English, though? (True, that doesn't make it "not a word" anywhere, but I'm pretty sure it's not commonly used in the US.)

it's popular in corporate speak, with people who think the more syllables you use, the more "official" and "business-like" you are.

There are other words like that and I'm totally blanking on them. Can anyone think of other words which mean exactly the same thing a another word with just a syllable tagged on it? The only one I can think of is imflammable.

use and utilize

Irregardless (yuck) and regardless.

haha, i have a co-worker that say "Fer say" instead of per se. *drives nuts* "well it's not really that, fer say, but.."

then there's the other guy who says "ideal" instead of idea. "so, i got this great ideal." "..ok, let's hear your bright ideal."

and btw, i pity all of you, since my grammar and spelling are awful.

but at least i admit it. first step, you know.

Well, in an idea world... you'd have a great ideal about how to improve it.

...fer say.

Reminds me of this woman in my holocaust class last semester.

She was doing her oral presentation on the occupation in poland, but couldn't pronounce the word "Kracow".

She pronounced it "crack-ho".

You know. The crack-ho ghetto. Rich crack-ho Jews.

hahaha - that's like my mother. cannot pronounce my friend Mariko's name to save her life. i've been saying "mariko" to her since 2001. but instead of "MAH-ri-ko" she still says "ma-RI-ka."

my aunt, actually, may need speech therapy - she pronounces tons of things wrong no matter how many times you say it to her. luckily, her daughter is about to get a degree in speech therapy :P she can't say "folk" without saying "fork." which will prove embarrassing as she's just opened a shop in a plaza called "Suffolk" and she constantly says "Suff-fork." "suff-FOLK, kel." "suff-FORK." "no." "then how do you say it?" "folk. like the folks next door. folk music." "......fork."� "*facepalm*" :D it's cute tho.

I had a professor who kept saying "gentile" instead of "genteel"

I have a coworker who consistently pronounces things wrong, despite hearing them said plenty of times. the one that really gets me is that he pronounces "Sirius" (at least when referring to the character in Harry Potter) as "sigh-russ". I wonder what he calls the satellite radio system...

In my head I have called him "Si-russ", but now that I'm reading aloud to Jeremy, I say "see-ri-us"

He probably thinks that his how you spell Cyrus and has never heard of the dog star or the satellite Network

When Meg Griffin left WFUV she told me where she was going and until I saw it in print i thought it was "Serious Satellite Radio."

*pictures himself being Dixon Hill and fighting Cyrus Redblock on the holodeck*

:D

*snicker* Rawk :-D *loves TNG*

-- Pauley

Wheee. Go Pauleeey!�� *TNG lovers unite*

*giggle*

Hee. fork music would be somewhat interesting though ...� :D

Steve does that all the time. He spends a fair amount of time working at the Navy base in Nor-FORK, Virginia. I don't know what the locals think of how he pronounces their town. (Then again, the legitimate pronounciation is semi-obscene -- "Naw-f'k" -- so I guess "fork" isn't a bad mistake to make.)

He also mispronounces Camden NJ (or Maine, for that matter) as "Candem." Which I think sounds entirely too much like "condom", but that's just my deranged mind.

ach,

that's just nasal assimilation. happens all the time :)

nasals often assimilate to the place of a following consonant.

say "in paris" really fast. when you're thinking about it, you'll annunciate properly, when you're not you'll probably say "im paris" (most english speakers do)

sorry, were we talking about pedants? *whistles innocently*

gah. And in reading your reply, what do I notice about my own post?

The misspelling, of course. You know, because I just bragged that I almost never misspell a word.

Verily, as Gordon stated below, pride goeth before a fall. :D

(Did anyone else catch it on first reading, and decide to not be pedantic, or did I just out-pedant you all? *runs*)

With computers you can always blame your misspellings on typing errors. خ U ��� @��3�� th3W

there was a woman my modern irish lit class who always pronounced "yeats" as "yeast." which was especially funny as she was always trying to impress the rest of us with how intellectual she was. :P

Maybe she was distracted by her "yates" infection.

how about "idear" instead of "idea"?

What do you call a buck with no eyes?

No eye deer.

What do you call a buck with no eyes or legs?

Still no eye deer.

What do you call a buck with no eyes, no legs, and no balls?

Still no f*cking eye deer.

I just remembered the pair that come up when I teach. symmetric and symmetrical. I finally learned how to spell them.

Heh...yeah I was talking about someone once and referred to them as "African". (I didn't know country of origin.)� Someone all snottily corrected me that it was "African-American." I was like...uh...no...they're not American at all. They've never even been there.

Plus (I may be wrong), I thought the rule was oriental could apply to objects and asian applied to humans. So the market could still be oriental? Or am I imagining those guidelines?

I once saw a guy on TV who was accused of running a guy out of town becuase he was black. He said, "I'm not a racist. I wouldn't care if he was a chinaman."

I have heard that rule too. The thing is these rules were simply declared and didn't evolve over time.

I always feel the need to correct people when they insist that the year 2000 was the first year of the 21st century. The worst part is that even once the logic is explained to them, and they understand that there wasn't a year 0, they still insist on it.

Some things... you just gotta let go.

There's a guy in my improv class with the obnoxious always-gotta-be-right nerd phenotype. Even if he's wrong, he'll argue it to the end to prove his intellectual "superiority".

Sometimes, I can shut him up by using big words he doesn't know... but most of the time I just let it go with a shrug and say, "Heh, that's what I get."

He thinks I mean, "That's what I get for arguing with an amazing supergenius!"

I really mean, "That's what I get for challenging this irritating know-it-all."

I mean, *I* know I'm right. And I know he's a prick.

From "The West Wing" episode "In Excelsis Deo":

Toby Ziegler: It's not the new millennium, but I'll just let it drop.
Sam Seaborn: It is.
Toby: It is not the new millennium. The year 2000 is the last year of the millennium, it's not the first year of the next one.
Sam: But the common sensibility, towards Steven Jay Gould...
Toby: Stephen Jay Gould needs to look at a calendar.
Sam: Gould says this is a largely unresolvable issue.
Toby: Yes, it's tough to resolve. You have to look at a calendar.
[pause]
Sam: You've got to ask yourself which is more exciting - watching your car roll over from 99.999 to 100.000 or watching it go from a hundred to a hundred and one.
C.J. Cregg: So technically the millennium is still a year away.
Sam: Yeah, but... we've made all these plans.

-- Pauley

See I don't get why it's not just exciting enough to see all the digits change without it having to BE a new millennium. But I guess I'm just a nerd who likes looking at numbers. :) But I think it's a nice compromise. "Sure, it's not the new millennium...but 2000 sure looks nifty!"

I don't care if the last millenium started on year 3. When the 1000's digit rolls over, it's a new millenium.

Welcome to the dumbing down of America for convenience and laziness.

thanks!

Where's the bathroom?

why does it really matter all that much?

I mean, you're right, but it's arbitrary to begin with.

o/~ The sun'll come out the day after tomorrow o/~

.oO Dalai lama told me that the day after tomorrow...it's all the same Oo.

hm.i think most pet peeves are. i mean, what do i care if my coworker says ideal instead of idea, or my aunt says fork instead of folk? it is arbitrary :P but we're talking about pedants here :P

ped�ant

1. One who pays undue attention to book learning and formal rules.
2. One who exhibits one's learning or scholarship ostentatiously.
3. Obsolete. A schoolmaster.

4. one who quotes from the dictionary to prove her point

*runs* :D

no, no, that was EXACTLY my point :P

Notice how not only do so many of us admit that we are obnoxious pedants, we are actually proud of it.

see, i dont think i'm that bad, but i am at work, because my coworkers will go ON and ON and ON about some stupid subject that none of them know a thing about, and i'll google it or post a defenition from the dictionary just so they'll SHUT UP :P

example: today it was the function of the prostate gland. dont ask how it got started, dont ask what they thought it did. *facepalm*

It lets you lie down right? That's why they call someone lying down prostate.

If you don't think that's right ask a seaman.

*facepalm*

Score!

but i *want* to know what they thought it did. because I am insatiably curious eeebil.

hee, how on topic (from www.bash.org):

<craig> i'm sorry, i should've remembered that many people are pedanic here
<Crappy> it's pedantic