Ask Lemmy

A whole lot of grammatical and/or punctuation-related things.

A particular bugbear is people using "disinterested" when the word they mean and should (IMO) use is "uninterested".

I appreciate that "disinterested" has come to mean "uninterested" but since it has another, already established meaning, I wish people would use them correctly.

For what it's worth:

• Uninterested - "that has no interest for me, I do not have interest in it."
• Disinterested - "that may or may not have interest for me, but either way, I do not have an interest in it."

Those who always want to correct usage of the word 'ironic', much like those who use 'whom' as the subject of a sentence, are trying to signal intelligence but revealing stupidity, and can be dismissed pretty much entirely as people to take seriously.

A double negative should never remain negative.

I hate hearing "didn't do nothing", as in, they did not do anything. I hate it because it's inconsistent.

"Didn't do nothing" would typically be interpreted as "did not do something". However "I did not, in fact, do nothing" might be interpreted as doing something.

Now you have grey zones and misunderstandings where you have no idea what they are talking about because they keep stacking negatives, with different meanings in different contexts.

Expresso

I get annoyed at people who wait at pedestrian crossings but never push the button.

Are they waiting for someone else to push it because it’s beneath them? Do they think it has cooties? Do they secretly not want to reach their destination? Do they think the buttons are fake, and traffic engineers are waiting to laugh at them on hidden cameras?

A disdain for nonfiction royalty, advertising, and movies with talking head montages.

If you insist on pronouncing "gif" as "gif" instead of "jif", you should pronounce "jpeg" as "jfeg".