What mis-stated phrases or words do you feel still need to be corrected (online or in person) in 2025?
Please state in which country your phrase tends to be used, what the phrase is, and what it should be.
Example:
In America, recently came across "back-petal", instead of back-pedal. Also, still hearing "for all intensive purposes" instead of "for all intents and purposes".
Capitalizing black mid-setence. It's an absolutely ridiculous convention, and something only the American Left could take seriously.
Sincerely, Everyone else
This thread peaks my interest.
I hope my words piqued someone else’s interests more.
Oh this one's peak
Using "racking" instead of the correct "wracking" in "wracking my brain". Not very common, but it annoys me... But not as much as "could of"... That is the worst, just stop it!
This is online and in person in Canada.
"For all intensive porpoises" is the one that really annoys me.
They're dolphins, not porpoises. Fuck, get your cetaceans right.
Lol I believe it's "for all intents and doplhins."
For all intensive dolphins
Feral intensive dolphins
For all intensive porpoises, we should create a care-free environment.
[cetacean needed]
About 1 in 3 posters here say “loose” when they mean “lose”
“Toe the party line” To align with the interests of a political party; to get in line with the agenda of the leader of a political party
“Tow the party line” Something to do with tugboats
TIL
English/US - seeing “would of” instead of “would’ve”or “would have”. This one bugs me the most.
The thing is that, at least in the UK, many people also say "of". You might say that in quick speech it's not possible to tell between "would've" and "would of" which is probably where this misspelling came from, but I once was talking to my English friend and after he said something quickly, I asked if he just said that "she would see it?", to which he replied "she would OF seen it" putting a lot of emphasis on that "of", making it clear that he wasn't aware that it should be "have".
Americans saying "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less".
I’ve seen so many attempts at justification for that one online but I can’t help but think that those people just don’t want to admit that they’re wrong.
I also like the bonus "hold down the fort" at the end.
Because as you know, it's an inflatable hover fort and, once relieved of my weight, it might float off into the sky.
Came here to share this one too
I care a tiny bit. I could care less, but not easily.
Doesn't this make sense if someone says it in a sarcastic manner?
No
I say “I could care less” and then follow it up with, “but I’d be dead”. Correcting “I could care less” is dumb because you literally can care less about lots of stuff, but saying the phrase indicates you just don’t really care.
I could care less, but then I wouldn't care at all...
I know someone that says 'Pacific' instead of 'specific'. The man has his talents & his place in the world, food man, but yes that is infuriating.
I know someone who calls it the “Specific Ocean”
Idiots misspelling lose as loose drives me up the wall. Even had someone defend themselves claiming it's just the common spelling now and to accept it. There, their, and they're get honorable mention. Nip it in the butt as opposed to correctly nipping it in the bud.
There is no fucking s at the end of "anyway"
Also, the vanishing use of countable quantities: they are all amounts nowadays.
We can make it a word though :)
Yeah, words aren't determined by dictionary committees or English teachers. They are determined by people using and understanding them.
All languages (other than ones designed deliberately, like Esperanto, Klingon, and Tolkien's elvish) started from the same root and diverged when populations reduced regular contact and all words and grammars were made up along the way.
I'm not entirely against it, but I'm amused by how common it is to put "whole" inside of "another", making it "a whole nother". Can anyone give any other use of the word "nother"?
Maybe it works like fucking
A-fucking-nother
A-whole-nother
people do generally fuck holes so that checks out
It's other, another is a whole other issue... heh
Q: "Did she do that?"
A: "No it was nother"
A nother one!
Pronounced like this
"Could of..."
It's "could have"!
Edit: I'm referring to text based things, like text and email. I can pretty much ignore the mispronouncing.
I think they just heard could've or meant to say could've
Also they're/their, your/you're, here/hear, to/too.
That's a dialectal difference, not an error.
Not when written
It's very much not recommended, and generally seen as an error. But this article puts an asterisk on it.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/whats-worse-than-coulda
Online in general: using "reductio ad absurdum" as a fallacy.
It's a longstanding logical tool. Here's an example of how it works: let's assume you can use infinity as a number. In that case, we can do:
∞ + 1 = ∞
And:
∞ - ∞ = 0
Agreed? If so, then:
∞ - ∞ + 1 = ∞ - ∞
And therefore:
1 = 0
Which is absurd. If we agree that all the logical steps to get there are correct, then the original premise (that we can use infinity as a number) must be wrong.
It's a great tool for teasing out incorrect assumptions. It has never been on any academic list of fallacies, and the Internet needs to stop saying otherwise. It's possible some other fallacy is being invoked while going through an argument, but it's not reductio ad absurdum.
People using 'yourself' and 'myself' instead of 'you' and 'me' when trying to sound formal or posh. You don't sound formal or posh, you sound ill-educated.
Have you a merry little Christmas, commoner.
I remember once being on a call with some customer support guy who didn't seem to even be aware that words "you" and "me" exist. My favourite part of the conversation was when he said "let myself put yourself on hold while I ask a senior colleague to clarify this for myself".
were they speaking hiberno-english by any chance?
They're, you're
Sneak peek
In portuguese: mas/mais - people often use "mais" (plus, sum) when the correct would be mas (but)
What do people say wrong istead of "sneek peek"?
Yeah /yĕ′ə, yă′ə, yā′ə/ is a different word than Yea /yā/
Ya
Jä
Please state what country your phrase tends to be used
Please state in which country your phrase tends to be used...
Casey Point
This reply deserves to be put on a peddle stool
Touché
Discreet vs Discrete used to crack me up on dating sites. All those guys looking for discrete hookups - which kind of makes sense but I am sure is not what they meant.
I literally ground my teeth today because I got an email from a customer service person saying "You're package was returned to us". Not a phishing email with an intentional misspelling, a legitimate email for a real order I made. If it is your JOB to send messages like this they ought not have misspellings.
So the context matters to me. I am more tolerant of spelling errors and mis-phrasing in everyday life than in a professional communication.
"that begs the question". I wish people would just use the more correct "raises the question", especially people doing educational/academic content. I hear it across the English-speaking internet
From what I've understood, "begging" a question is more like "evading" a question. (Here's a video)
Begging the question was originally a very specific logical fallacy. It's a type of reasoning where you circularly try to prove your argument. I just kinda wish the usage wasn't being muddied. https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-original-meaning-of-begging-the-question
Worst Case Ontario
Get two birds stoned at once!
Haahahhaahahhahahahahaahaah
Reminds me of "Worse case scenario"
Worser cast scenario.
Thanks! I'll be using that from now on.
People saying "exscape", "expresso", "pasghetti"
Haha is this a follow up on that one post with the OP writing "back-petal"?
Using weary/wary interchangeably. I am tired of people not being aware of the difference.
Also, "decimated". The original usage is to reduce by one tenth. It didn't mean something was nearly or totally annihilated, but thanks to overuse, now it does.
That “decimated” ship has sailed. The common usage changed long ago so getting pedantic about the original meaning does not help.
We didn’t have internet then but we do now. This is exactly what we need. It’s good to have flexibility for new words, for slang, even new meanings but let’s make sure mistakes don’t change the meaning of things
I mean, having one in ten of your fellow soldiers murdered by their own commander is pretty horrific, and I think that's the spirit of its modern usage.
Must have been great for morale.
/s just in case
I hear 'weary' used in place of 'wary', I don't think I've come across the reverse. Drives me crazy though.
Yep. This is the one. It irks the heck out of me when people are saying something to the effect of "I had a bad experience once, now I'm tired and fatigued about this situation in the future."
Or "I would be worn out, like after a long hike or something, about things that sound too good to be true, folks! Be careful!"
Agghhh! Lol. I get English can be awfully confusing sometimes but I've been seeing this one pop up a LOT more recently.
(Dis)honors also go to "loosing my keys" or "being a stealthy rouge"
Like I get someone tried to say leery or wary at the same time and it came out all jumbled. But then the mistake took on a terrible life of its own.
Irregardless
Irregardless.
Without regardless
Without without regard
With regard
I'm going to end my emails with irregardless and see what happens. What's the worst that can happen?
"Irregardless, MajorMajormajormajor."
I'm writing with regards to the issue of...
That's very friendly and I'll be sure to forward your regards...🙄
This is literally a restaurant near me. Quite good one too
affect vs effect.
the usual case for effect is as a noun, and for affect, as a verb.
Just to clarify the exceptions to the general rule:
effect as a verb: to cause or bring about
This policy effects change.
affect as a noun: a display of emotion
She greeted us with warm affect.
Personally I would jsut deprecate the word "affect" entirely. Same with "inflammable" and "cleanse."
There are three uses for each, intertwined.
Good luck.
"The weather can affect/effect your mood"
Both correct. Both mean the same thing.
imo, for this to mean the same thing "mood" has to change meanings in between.
"Chomping at the bit". It's champing at the bit. Horses champ.
"Get ahold of". It's "get hold of" or, if you must, "get a hold of"
"I'm doing good". No, Superman does good. You're doing well.
You do things on purpose or by accident, you don't do anything on accident.
Sometimes I do things off purpose.
For non native English speakers (such as myself), these things can get tricky. It can be difficult to know which preposition is right especially when in relation to non-tangible concepts such as time, accidents, or purpose. Please do correct them though, people eventually learn with repetition.
Look, I've been speaking English for work and pleasure for thirty years now and I'm here to tell everybody that prepositions in English are arbitrary conventions and it's all mostly fair game.
Unless you are trying to precisely identify the position of an object relative to something else, the "correct" preposition is a few years of consensus away from changing.
Our language is the offcuts of several others stitched together, to make some sort of coherent garbage.
Never feel bad about getting something wrong - most of the natives butcher it in their daily lives without a second thought.
The accents are wild too. I feel so sorry for new speakers that are confronted with Scots. The further north you go, the more unintelligible it gets to the basic English speaker.
I'm from Angus originally (not the very top, but close enough), but moved to Wales. There was a period of time where I could understand everyone, but found myself not understood by others.
Eventually my own accent settled into some sort of "Scwelsh" that works, but it's difficult for listeners to place me geographically.
Have a few bonus Welshisms for your trouble:
"I do do that I do" - I also do this
Whose coat is that jacket? - Who owns this coat?
Now in a minute - Could be immediately. Could actually be in a minute. Could be an hour from now.
You're right, English is dumb, but I'd say 95% of the time it's native English speakers I hear getting this particular one wrong.
I definitely understand that. But none of this thread is trying to hold non native speakers' feet to the fire.
I hope you know of that phrase. I just realized that's a saying that might not translate.
... or by purpose.
Pretty sure it's "Feral Intensive Porpoises"
Former colleague used to say "for all intensive purposes"every few sentences.
Idiocracy is literally a documentary anymore
My pet peeve is when people use "then" but they actually meant to use "than". I think it might be mainly due to flaws in predictive text on phone keyboards though.
Fuck yes. Most annoying mistake in English. Seems to have sharply risen during the last few years
More then a few made the mistake back than, too.
It's one of those ones that bother me too as a non-native speaker, they're such different words from each other when you learn them more from reading than oral exposure. The they're/their/there trio is another one where I can't fathom how people have issues distinguishing them.
This one never gets me anywhere, but “begging the question” is actually a logical fallacy where you assume the result and use that as the basis of your argument. Otherwise, it raises the question.
The same goes for the exception that proves the rule. People use it as a magic spell that does away with unwanted evidence but it's self explanatory. No parking on Fridays means you can park every other day.
"addicting"
"If worse comes to worst..."
In British English, they often say the phrase as "if worst comes to worst," which is based on archaic grammar.
In the US, there's a mix of verb tenses. The only one that make sense in this day and age is "if what is worse comes to be the worst," or "if worse comes to worst."
This point can be argued, but I will be severely wounded (maybe not so much as dying) defending this hill.
It's always going to be the "of" people. Its "would have", "should have" etc and not "would of".
The vast majority of these issues could be solved if people a) read any halfway-decent book, b) and didn’t choose to remain willfully ignorant. It’s fine to misunderstand or just not know something. We’ve all been there, we’ll be there again. NBD. But to be shown or offered the correct way and still choose to do it wrongly? That’s not cool at all.
Aisle. As much as I would love to take a boat to the breakfast food isle (a.k.a. island), I'm pretty sure that I need to look in the breakfast aisle at the grocery store.
"per se" (US) - people generally use it as "exactly" or "specifically", e g. "It's not circular, per se, more like a rounded rectangle". However, it actually means "in and of itself". I have a coworker that misuses this one constantly (and also spells it incorrectly) and it's become a huge pet peeve.
Huh TIL I've been using per se wrong. Thanks stranger!
Because of South Park, I occasionally end sentences with that phrase, per se.
Having made some of these mistakes, I tend not to be rigid about them. But here are some fun ones.
All of the above have been normalized, but at one time was not.
Another quirk, we used to not call former Presidents President So and So. We used to call them by their highest position before president. So it would be Senator Obama and not President Obama.
That first one really bugs me for an entirely different reason: autocorrect keeps changing them on me.
I'm confused about the context of "on line" vs "in line"
Are we talking about standing in a queue, or using the internet, or one's behavior ("you'd better get get yourself in line!"), or auto racing terminology ("stay on your line" or "hold your line", often shortened to "stay on line")?
Doubt it's that last one lol but where are those two getting mixed up and how might they differ from "online" (internet) and "inline" (skates)?
Lol this is such a fun thread
I thought "on line" was an Eastern US thing; never heard it in the South, Midwest or West Coast.
"You can't have your cake and eat it" The older form was flipped: "you can't eat your cake and have it" They both can mean about the same, but the older form makes it much clearer - if you've eaten your cake, you no longer have it. But you could have your cake, then eat it.
Reminds me of that story where a fellow on the lake was chilly and tried to start a small fire in the boat, but it just burned a hole through it and he had to swim to shore.
Just goes to show you...
"You can't have your kayak and heat it, too."
Thank you! I've always heard the former and never felt it quite made sense. Now I understand why.
Mr Kaczynski? I thought you were dead?
What entitlement means vs false sense of entitlement.
I tell people they are entitled to their rights and have an entitlement to their social security money for example, and they get offended thinking I mean "false sense of entitlement" instead.
Coming from the other direction - when someone ackshullys a parson, but the person was using the phrase correctly.
I had to explain to someone online today that "liminal space" had multiple meanings, and it didn't only refer to spaces you transition through, and the spooky "liminal space aesthetic" is a valid and coherent use of the word "liminal" and the term "liminal space"
On accident, it is by accident. 🤬
It's "I didn't taste it, let alone finish it." not "I didn't finish it, let alone taste it.". Not those exact words, of course. People get it wrong more often than not IME. The wrong version never makes sense, and it always trips me up.
Oh man, "let alone" is severely misused. Good one!
Don't think I've seen that myself, but that would be pretty fucking annoying for sure.
To "step foot on". I don't care that millennial journalists are now sullying the literal NYT with this, it's WRONG. It's to set foot on. To SET foot on.
Step foot I'm stuck!
Wh... What are you doing, step-toe?
"Set foot" might be better established (and sound better), but "step foot" is not new.
Yeah yeah I know. But "set" (fun fact: it's the word with the most meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary) is the transitive form of "sit", so it's more grammatical, more elegant and shorter than "step". Which obviously comes from a mishearing by someone who didn't read books, yet people will still get indignant and claim that it's somehow better! I need to lie down. ;)
Using “uncomfy” instead of uncomfortable. I recognize this one is fully style, but it’s like nails on a chalkboard. Break the entirely fake rules of grammar and spelling all you want, but have some decency when it comes to connotation.
Comfy is an informal and almost diminutive form (not technically, but it follows the structure so it kinda feels like it) of comfortable. You have to have a degree of comfort to use the less formal “comfy,” so uncomfy is just…paradoxical? Oxymoronic? Ironic? I’d be ok with it used for humor, but not in earnest.
Relatedly, for me “comfy” is necessarily referring to physical comfort, not emotional. I can be either comfy or comfortable in a soft fuzzy chair. I can be comfortable in a new social situation. I can be uncomfortable in either. I can be uncomfy in neither, because that would be ridiculous.
FWIW I would never actually correct someone on this. I would immediately have my linguist card revoked, and I can’t point to a real fake grammatical rule that would make it “incorrect” even if I wanted to. But this is the one and only English usage thing I hate, and I hate it very, very much.
The only one that continues to bug me is using "an" instead of "a" before a word that starts with a consonant sound. I especially dislike the phrase "an historic" (as in "it was an historic victory") which has bafflingly been deemed acceptable. Unless you're a cockney, it should be "a historic". The rule is to use "an" if the word starts with a vowel sound, and "a" otherwise. IMO.
I believe this comes from people trying to show off their education. Traditionally, words with a french descent were pronounced with a silent H. So for example hospital (from French hôpital) is an hospital, where hound (from Germanic hund) is a hound.
This is pretty much deprecated these days and anyone enforcing it is beyond grammar nazi, but it's interesting to know the pattern.
Source: my secondary school English teacher.
I’ve mentioned this here before but in the UK “an historic” is written because we are slowly dropping the letter “h” at the front of words from pronunciation. UK people often say “an ‘istoric” so it kinda makes sense… but looks clumsy.
It also makes it more clear your not saying "ahistoric" or "ahistorical"
I follow Jeremy Clarkson and intentionally always use the wrong one. There’s an horse. A apple.
Ditto.
Well hell, I use "an" before historic, every time.
It’s fine if you drop the letter “h” when you speak - like I do. It then becomes “an ‘istoric” and sounds correct.
"flush it out" instead of "flesh it out" when designing a plan
"Let's flush out this design."
"You got it!" [Slowly readies a grenade.]
Sometimes you just need to send some dogs into that meeting and shoot the first plan that comes flying out.
I, too, like to abort all my ideas onto the page...
That one drives me nuts too. "Coming down the pike" too. I'm not even sure that one is incorrect, I just dislike how overused and generic it sounds in the office
Using loose instead of lose.
I'm losing friends for loosing dogs on useless losers' loose use of lose and loose
The "positive anymore" is a vile grammatical abomination spawning from the Midwest US.
Normally using the word anymore has a negative tone to it (I don't eat meat anymore) . Except when used in this manner which seems to be when they should instead be saying currently or nowadays.
I find it viscerally unappealing.
Those mis-stated phrases are called eggcorns. They’re a fascinating contributor to the evolution of language.
The term egg corn (later contracted into one word, eggcorn) was coined by professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum in September 2003 in response to an article by Mark Liberman on the website Language Log, a group blog for linguists.[5] In his article, Liberman discussed the case of a woman who had used the phrase egg corn for acorn, and he noted that this specific type of substitution lacked a name. Pullum suggested using egg corn itself as a label.[6]
Ah! I'll read this over dinner.
Bone apple tea! :p
There’s a video on it! https://youtu.be/F12LSAbos7A
I really hate it when us media uses the word "ouster".
For example:
"Vail Resorts shareholder calls for ouster of CEO, CFO and Rob Katz"
They mean to use the word here as "removal", but "oust" is also a verb and "ouster" would be "one who ousts".
So, calls for the ouster of the CEO/CFO to do what?
They could just use "ousting"
Yup!
What I really hate is when people don’t capitalize the abbreviation US, because it makes me think they’re saying “us” as in “we,” or “oui” as the French like to say, no?
😀
I think the ouster is supposed to be the event that results in ousting. But it's so redundant it's not funny. Removal would be for much better.
OK, since you mentioned the media, putting "gate" after any government scandal. Nixon's scandal was involving the Watergate Office Building.