Pet Peeve Phrases

I have to get a few pet peeves off my chest.

It all came up a few weeks ago, watching an episode of Survivor. They were in the midst of a heated discussion at Tribal Council, and one contestant was spouting off a litany of horrible things about another contestant. She wanted to say that she was only human. She didn't.

She called herself a humanitarian. If you haven't been watching, let me reassure you that "humanitarian" is about the last word I would use to describe this particular Survivor contestant.

And I was left shaking my head, along with most of the rest of the people sitting beside her, and most of the people watching at home. This person might not recognize even today, after watching herself saying something so ridiculous on national TV, that she made a massive error with her phrasing that day.

Sadly, she's not alone. I tend to think that a lot of people don't stop to think about what they're saying, to see if it actually makes sense. I'd like to hone in on a few of them. (To my great despair, that mistake has been made so frequently for so long, that some experts are beginning to say it is acceptable. Pardon me while I shudder.) All the time I hear people saying that they could care less, or that they need to flush out the details of something. People never want to be the escape goat for these acts, but for all intensive purposes, they will have to pay the piper for their own inaccuracies.

Irregardless of the great pain it causes me to look at these phrasing errors though, I must go on. They don't just occur in speech. Finding them in print isn't a mute point. It happens all too commonly. I'm not one to sit around with baited breath, hoping that people will come to their senses and stop using these phrases that are quite beyond the pail. Nope, bringing these issues to the forefront is of the upmost importance to me. Before I get myself worked into too high a dungeon, perhaps I should move on.

Thanks for allowing me this moment to get that out of my system.

What word or phrase mistakes that people make drive you up the wall? And which ones have you been guilty of?

**Originally published at Lady Scribes**