"Centered around" instead of "centered on" drives me batty. You can't center "around" anything, it makes no sense. It's either centered or it's not! And it's used by professionals all the time in journalism and broadcasts.
Speaking of broadcasts, particularly in sports, "begs the question" is used incorrectly almost 100% of the time. Begging the question is a logical fallacy. What they mean is "raises the question" or "invites the question" but certainly not begs.
"Begs the question" instead of "raises the question" always sounds to me like someone is trying (and failing) to sound smart and sophisticated. It manages to make people sound pretentious and ignorant at the same time.
I think this is because people are unfamiliar with logical fallacies. If learning those was part of our education, this error would not be so common. I used it incorrectly until I learned what it really meant as a logical fallacy.
I hate this too. It's the tell-tale "fancification" of language that poor/uneducated people do to "sound like educated people." But it's the linguistic version of a poor man's idea of a rich man's taste.
They think adding more words, and using longer constructions than necessary, sounds "fancy/classy." It doesn't, especially when they get the tenses and conjugations wrong.
-perhaps 'they' are not thinking, rather mimicking what they hear, and/ or no one is brave enough to correct the language? The abuse of the language seems it's mimicked...
I remember being with my (intelligent) ex and talking about his daughter not learning grammar in school. Her writing was abhorrent. He said the teachers said they will teach grammar in another year. For now they just wanted the students to freely write how they felt. I cringed inside hearing it. I don't think they ever did get to it....and she wanted to be in the press or a writer somehow.
Remember the 1990s eubonics wave of anger? When if you said "I know it's a black guy on the radio by his voice" Jesse Jackson would break into your house in the middle of the night and turn over the garbage cans, or something? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
That's really wild to recall. I subscribe to John McWhorter's podcast, "Lexicon Valley" and on a recent episode he dissected in minute detail the speech characteristics of a certain newly ascendant PBS announcer who, in his description, "sounds way more black than would have been acceptable to PBS 20 years ago." Apparently you can talk about it now, at least if you yourself are black.
"Some of these days" instead of "one of these days" drives me nuts. I realize it's common in some region of the country, but it doesn't make any sense. For example: "Some of these days I'm going to kill you!" Some means more than one. How many times can you kill someone?
I grew up in rural Indiana, and a main mission of our English teachers from about grades four through eight was to beat our Hoosier hayseed speech patterns out of us. We were mocked and punished for locutions like "Warshington", "liberry", "ambalants", "all the {adjective}er" (e.g., "that's all the warmer it's gonna get today"). It worked, and no doubt made it easier for the more academically-inclined of us to move up to college and professional employment later. They meant well, and believed it was a necessary part of our education.
It probably was. But it also had the unfortunate side effect of encouraging contempt for our "backward" parents and grandparents and a completely unearned sense of superiority on our parts. I'm often of two minds concerning these stories of degraded speech, particularly when they come bedecked with class-stratified ribbons.
You make good points. I freely admit that I'm unrepentantly biased against the low-class dialects, and that's because it's personal. I come from white trash, and one way my mother rebelled against being trashy was insisting that we read, speak, and write correctly.
In my early college years, my friends made fun of my upstate NY accent. It's similar to some upper Midwest patterns. It's sharp and nasal. "I'll have the seel-id with reee-inch dressing," "Oh my Gad that's scary!"
So I deliberately and consciously practiced a flat, from nowhere American newscaster accent for years until it became second nature.
It was a good choice for my goals, and has served me well in how I'm perceived as a public speaker.
We can disapprove of class prejudices all we want, but they will not go away. They will always be there. They always have. This cannot be "educated" or "moraled" out of people.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I did not recognize this truth on my own -- that the group most repelled by white trash behavior is not the country club set, but the working class immediately above it who are (or at least feel themselves to be) perpetually a couple of bad decisions away from falling back into trashdom. I had to read it in Caitlin Flanagan's review of a biography of Helen Gurley Brown: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/sex-and-the-married-man/307622/
I'm a millennial (I was thirteen in the year 2000 when the shift was happening), and I find these speech patterns irritating too. One example that always bothers me is people saying "bored of" instead of "bored with." Or "I could CARE less" instead of "I couldn't care less." Yes, it's weird how acting poor and dressing poor became a sign of social status (or "street cred," if you prefer). I think part of the reason is because poverty was--and still is--associated with victimhood, and victimhood became a powerful form of social currency as everything became more and more woke. When people decided that "the personal is political," that's when it truly began.
True, but I use the word ironically, as I'm sure most of us do. Hahaha. It's satisfying to see these people get hoisted with their own linguistic petard when their self-flattering words that they invented are turned against them and made into something derogatory.
I worked with a very professional black woman in the mid-90s, and if she heard anyone (black or white) speak in ways that only lower-class, inner-city, grammatically challenged black people spoke, she would correct them without hesitation.
She had, in fact, grown up in a lower-class, inner-city environment - and had worked very hard to get out of it despite having had a baby at 15. She joined the military, spent 20 years in the Air Force, went to college on the GI Bill, and excelled in her post-military career. I admired her tremendously.
I go to war every semester with “based off of.” Students seem surprised that the correct phrase—and the more elegant one—is “based ON.” I think Josh’s timeline & rationale is mostly correct, but “based off of” didn’t really start to chap my ass until 2008-2010. Shortly thereafter, we heard it on NPR & other broadcast news, and I knew resistance was futile. 😒
I haven’t listened to them in years—probably since 2018? It was their lying constantly about race & gender identity issues that were the last straw for me.
I hear that all the time when witnesses are interviewed by street reporters on local tv news. I've decided that if any reporter ever approaches me, I'm going to go full hillbilly. "Yep, I seen him! He come out o' that house over there! Sorry, I don't got nothin' else to say. Don't even aks me."
I’m not Gen Z but what bothers me is “I appreciate you” instead of “I appreciate it”. I guess it’s correct grammatically, but was a rapid, forced change to common usage.
It's a reflection of narcissism. We now unspokenly, and unconsciously, believe we have to flatter people's ego perceptions of themselves instead of complimenting their behavior.
Exactly! I work in retail selling supplements. Anytime I would finish up a customer, giving my shpiel on this or that vitamin, they would often say something like, "you're so smart", or "you're really educated". It always rubbed me the wrong way. I'm thinking, "ma'am, I don't need your complements. I need to know that you understood what I just told you, so I know that you know what you're about to buy, and how to take it". But God forbid I'm that candid with such a customer. 🙄🙄🙄
This reminds me of how no one understands the concept of a gerund (a verb ending in -ing that is used as a noun) - i.e., “I appreciate your helping me.” It’s NOT “I appreciate you helping me.”
What about people using reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself) in non-reflexive contexts, so basically as substitutes for standard pronouns (you, I, me)? It's been huge in the corporate world and in customer service for at least a decade and just keeps getting worse.
I've come to see some truly egregious examples like "Yourself and John can present the report to the client".
I’m not Gen X but what bothers me is “I appreciate you” instead of “I appreciate it”. I guess it’s correct grammatically, but was a rapid, forced change to common usage.
Older Gen X from the East Coast. I grew up middle class and constantly having my grammar and pronunciation corrected by my mother and teachers . Older (Eastern European) immigrant or first generation American relatives were also corrected on their pronunciation and grammar by their adult children. I knew not to flatten my vowels like a Pennsylvania, or drop the ends of words and run sentences together like a Brooklynite. Now that those relatives have died, I have to be my own language police while trying not to sound overly mannered or just plain odd.
Don’t get me started in business speak’, that nonsensical double-speak crosses all generations.
This REALLY struck a chord with me. The degradation of language of which you speak has bothered me for a long time, such that some family members accuse me of being a grammar nazi. Whatever. I don’t care. I have no plans to stop holding the line. Language matters. Grammar matters. Punctuation matters too. HUGE issues with spelling and punctuation among the young.
My big peeve is written: Adults who type "wanna" and "gonna," even in what are supposed to be professional communications. I see it as a symptom of the toddlerization of society. It fits right in with the whine of "commyounidy" and all the rest.
Yes! I actually first started noticing this in emails written by some people I knew who otherwise wrote in excellent English and were often operating in professional capacities. However, their first language was not English and, for some reason, they were mostly Russians (back when it was allowed to have Russian friends.) I found that very odd at the time, which was before automatic word correction.
I agree, most certainly in formal academic or business writing, or in an article or essay. But in an informal written setting, like a friendly email or letter, or a comment in a forum, I don't have any problem with colloquialisms like "gonna", especially if I'm fully aware that the writer knows the formal way to say the same thing. In cases like that, I ain't gonna worry about it.
Update: After writing this, I remembered how irritating I find it when people write "prolly" instead of "probably" in emails and forum comments. It's exactly the same thing I condoned, above. So I'm reconsidering the whole thing.
The phrase "based off of" really started to take off in the early 2000s, and I can't help but think that the explosion of informal online communication played a huge role in that. While some might embrace this shift, it drives me up the wall! After all, “based on” is the traditional phrase that makes more sense, whereas “off” implies separation—something that doesn’t sit right with grammar purists like me.
At 60 years old, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t frustrated with how language has morphed over the last two generations. It feels like a reflection of broader societal issues—cultural appropriation, stereotyping, double standards, and a dip in authenticity. Curiously, this shift aligns with the rise of hip-hop and rap in the 1990s, and then the internet boom of the 2000s brought it all into the mainstream. With platforms like Twitter (now X), Instagram, Vine, and TikTok, suddenly we were swimming in a sea of new phrases and abbreviations.
I get that language evolves—it's natural! But to me, the sloppiness and disregard for proper English, along with the rampant use of slang that twists spelling and pronunciation, is downright ridiculous. I remain committed to the language I grew up with, sticking to the correct pronunciations and spellings that were instilled in me. There’s something to be said for holding onto the roots of language, don’t you think?
"Centered around" instead of "centered on" drives me batty. You can't center "around" anything, it makes no sense. It's either centered or it's not! And it's used by professionals all the time in journalism and broadcasts.
Speaking of broadcasts, particularly in sports, "begs the question" is used incorrectly almost 100% of the time. Begging the question is a logical fallacy. What they mean is "raises the question" or "invites the question" but certainly not begs.
Grrr.
"Begs the question" instead of "raises the question" always sounds to me like someone is trying (and failing) to sound smart and sophisticated. It manages to make people sound pretentious and ignorant at the same time.
Just like "I feel badly".
When someone says "I feel badly," just respond with "I feel hungrily" or "I feel tiredly" in order to mess with them. 😉
One time, after my sister-in-law said "I feel badly", I replied "I feel goodly".
Well, I feel goodingly.
But maybe their fingers have no nerve endings.
"Begs the question". I HATE this one, and I hear it from intelligent people. I think this one is lost.
I think this is because people are unfamiliar with logical fallacies. If learning those was part of our education, this error would not be so common. I used it incorrectly until I learned what it really meant as a logical fallacy.
He had RAN the store.
We had CAME down for a visit.
Shrieking inside.
Hearing this depresses me. What, if anything, are teachers doing?
I hate this too. It's the tell-tale "fancification" of language that poor/uneducated people do to "sound like educated people." But it's the linguistic version of a poor man's idea of a rich man's taste.
They think adding more words, and using longer constructions than necessary, sounds "fancy/classy." It doesn't, especially when they get the tenses and conjugations wrong.
Like five year olds doing "cursive."
-perhaps 'they' are not thinking, rather mimicking what they hear, and/ or no one is brave enough to correct the language? The abuse of the language seems it's mimicked...
Not thought out...
My nephews, successful 30-somethings, will say "I haven't ate yet". Just incredible.
That hurts to read!
This construction is also common in rural areas.
I remember being with my (intelligent) ex and talking about his daughter not learning grammar in school. Her writing was abhorrent. He said the teachers said they will teach grammar in another year. For now they just wanted the students to freely write how they felt. I cringed inside hearing it. I don't think they ever did get to it....and she wanted to be in the press or a writer somehow.
Oh my gosh I hate it. This is done to perfection by the people who appear on the Judge Judy show.
Remember the 1990s eubonics wave of anger? When if you said "I know it's a black guy on the radio by his voice" Jesse Jackson would break into your house in the middle of the night and turn over the garbage cans, or something? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
That's really wild to recall. I subscribe to John McWhorter's podcast, "Lexicon Valley" and on a recent episode he dissected in minute detail the speech characteristics of a certain newly ascendant PBS announcer who, in his description, "sounds way more black than would have been acceptable to PBS 20 years ago." Apparently you can talk about it now, at least if you yourself are black.
It's also this "real talk" podcaster style that's starting to infiltrate established media.
I remember, during Kato Kaelin's testimony in the O. J. Simpson trial, when he said he had heard "black voices". Heads exploded.
Maybe that's what started the eubonics thing. The timeline matches up
Another pet peeve.... "on accident" and "by accident"
Yeah—where did that nonsense come from? Like New Yorkers who say “on line” rather than “in line” (for a movie, etc.)
If there were a line painted on the floor where people were supposed to line up, it would make some sense. Otherwise not.
Thank you! I came here to say this!
"Some of these days" instead of "one of these days" drives me nuts. I realize it's common in some region of the country, but it doesn't make any sense. For example: "Some of these days I'm going to kill you!" Some means more than one. How many times can you kill someone?
😂
I grew up in rural Indiana, and a main mission of our English teachers from about grades four through eight was to beat our Hoosier hayseed speech patterns out of us. We were mocked and punished for locutions like "Warshington", "liberry", "ambalants", "all the {adjective}er" (e.g., "that's all the warmer it's gonna get today"). It worked, and no doubt made it easier for the more academically-inclined of us to move up to college and professional employment later. They meant well, and believed it was a necessary part of our education.
It probably was. But it also had the unfortunate side effect of encouraging contempt for our "backward" parents and grandparents and a completely unearned sense of superiority on our parts. I'm often of two minds concerning these stories of degraded speech, particularly when they come bedecked with class-stratified ribbons.
You make good points. I freely admit that I'm unrepentantly biased against the low-class dialects, and that's because it's personal. I come from white trash, and one way my mother rebelled against being trashy was insisting that we read, speak, and write correctly.
In my early college years, my friends made fun of my upstate NY accent. It's similar to some upper Midwest patterns. It's sharp and nasal. "I'll have the seel-id with reee-inch dressing," "Oh my Gad that's scary!"
So I deliberately and consciously practiced a flat, from nowhere American newscaster accent for years until it became second nature.
It was a good choice for my goals, and has served me well in how I'm perceived as a public speaker.
We can disapprove of class prejudices all we want, but they will not go away. They will always be there. They always have. This cannot be "educated" or "moraled" out of people.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I did not recognize this truth on my own -- that the group most repelled by white trash behavior is not the country club set, but the working class immediately above it who are (or at least feel themselves to be) perpetually a couple of bad decisions away from falling back into trashdom. I had to read it in Caitlin Flanagan's review of a biography of Helen Gurley Brown: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/sex-and-the-married-man/307622/
I'm a millennial (I was thirteen in the year 2000 when the shift was happening), and I find these speech patterns irritating too. One example that always bothers me is people saying "bored of" instead of "bored with." Or "I could CARE less" instead of "I couldn't care less." Yes, it's weird how acting poor and dressing poor became a sign of social status (or "street cred," if you prefer). I think part of the reason is because poverty was--and still is--associated with victimhood, and victimhood became a powerful form of social currency as everything became more and more woke. When people decided that "the personal is political," that's when it truly began.
When someone says "I could care less", I always say "Oh, so you do care at least a little bit?"
The term "woke" is also from this same, low-class demographic.
True, but I use the word ironically, as I'm sure most of us do. Hahaha. It's satisfying to see these people get hoisted with their own linguistic petard when their self-flattering words that they invented are turned against them and made into something derogatory.
Yes, yes, yes. Off to light a candle at the Josh Shrine.
I worked with a very professional black woman in the mid-90s, and if she heard anyone (black or white) speak in ways that only lower-class, inner-city, grammatically challenged black people spoke, she would correct them without hesitation.
She had, in fact, grown up in a lower-class, inner-city environment - and had worked very hard to get out of it despite having had a baby at 15. She joined the military, spent 20 years in the Air Force, went to college on the GI Bill, and excelled in her post-military career. I admired her tremendously.
I go to war every semester with “based off of.” Students seem surprised that the correct phrase—and the more elegant one—is “based ON.” I think Josh’s timeline & rationale is mostly correct, but “based off of” didn’t really start to chap my ass until 2008-2010. Shortly thereafter, we heard it on NPR & other broadcast news, and I knew resistance was futile. 😒
One of the best things you can do for your students is to steer them away from NPR.
I haven’t listened to them in years—probably since 2018? It was their lying constantly about race & gender identity issues that were the last straw for me.
I, too, was once a listener, but I haven't tuned in since they became a lying mouthpiece for the Cult of Woke. Same for PBS.
100% Josh. I hear broadcasters do it and find myself screaming at them. Ugh
Agreed with your analysis, Josh. Another one that gets on my last nerve is using seen instead of saw, as in “I seen him yesterday.”
Also: "can you borrow me" instead of "can you loan me."
I hear that all the time when witnesses are interviewed by street reporters on local tv news. I've decided that if any reporter ever approaches me, I'm going to go full hillbilly. "Yep, I seen him! He come out o' that house over there! Sorry, I don't got nothin' else to say. Don't even aks me."
You're reminding me of all those old YouTube videos like the Bedroom Intruder or the leprechaun sightings in Mobile, Alabama.
Laughing so hard!
I’m not Gen Z but what bothers me is “I appreciate you” instead of “I appreciate it”. I guess it’s correct grammatically, but was a rapid, forced change to common usage.
It's a reflection of narcissism. We now unspokenly, and unconsciously, believe we have to flatter people's ego perceptions of themselves instead of complimenting their behavior.
Exactly! I work in retail selling supplements. Anytime I would finish up a customer, giving my shpiel on this or that vitamin, they would often say something like, "you're so smart", or "you're really educated". It always rubbed me the wrong way. I'm thinking, "ma'am, I don't need your complements. I need to know that you understood what I just told you, so I know that you know what you're about to buy, and how to take it". But God forbid I'm that candid with such a customer. 🙄🙄🙄
...compliments...
😅🤦♀️
This reminds me of how no one understands the concept of a gerund (a verb ending in -ing that is used as a noun) - i.e., “I appreciate your helping me.” It’s NOT “I appreciate you helping me.”
What about people using reflexive pronouns (myself, yourself) in non-reflexive contexts, so basically as substitutes for standard pronouns (you, I, me)? It's been huge in the corporate world and in customer service for at least a decade and just keeps getting worse.
I've come to see some truly egregious examples like "Yourself and John can present the report to the client".
This causes me almost physical pain to hear!
I’m not Gen X but what bothers me is “I appreciate you” instead of “I appreciate it”. I guess it’s correct grammatically, but was a rapid, forced change to common usage.
Older Gen X from the East Coast. I grew up middle class and constantly having my grammar and pronunciation corrected by my mother and teachers . Older (Eastern European) immigrant or first generation American relatives were also corrected on their pronunciation and grammar by their adult children. I knew not to flatten my vowels like a Pennsylvania, or drop the ends of words and run sentences together like a Brooklynite. Now that those relatives have died, I have to be my own language police while trying not to sound overly mannered or just plain odd.
Don’t get me started in business speak’, that nonsensical double-speak crosses all generations.
MANY FEWER???
Pennsylvanian is what I typed but autocorrect corrected me.
I feel your pain, throughout. 😂
Office jargon is painful.
This REALLY struck a chord with me. The degradation of language of which you speak has bothered me for a long time, such that some family members accuse me of being a grammar nazi. Whatever. I don’t care. I have no plans to stop holding the line. Language matters. Grammar matters. Punctuation matters too. HUGE issues with spelling and punctuation among the young.
My big peeve is written: Adults who type "wanna" and "gonna," even in what are supposed to be professional communications. I see it as a symptom of the toddlerization of society. It fits right in with the whine of "commyounidy" and all the rest.
Yes! I actually first started noticing this in emails written by some people I knew who otherwise wrote in excellent English and were often operating in professional capacities. However, their first language was not English and, for some reason, they were mostly Russians (back when it was allowed to have Russian friends.) I found that very odd at the time, which was before automatic word correction.
I agree, most certainly in formal academic or business writing, or in an article or essay. But in an informal written setting, like a friendly email or letter, or a comment in a forum, I don't have any problem with colloquialisms like "gonna", especially if I'm fully aware that the writer knows the formal way to say the same thing. In cases like that, I ain't gonna worry about it.
Update: After writing this, I remembered how irritating I find it when people write "prolly" instead of "probably" in emails and forum comments. It's exactly the same thing I condoned, above. So I'm reconsidering the whole thing.
The phrase "based off of" really started to take off in the early 2000s, and I can't help but think that the explosion of informal online communication played a huge role in that. While some might embrace this shift, it drives me up the wall! After all, “based on” is the traditional phrase that makes more sense, whereas “off” implies separation—something that doesn’t sit right with grammar purists like me.
At 60 years old, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t frustrated with how language has morphed over the last two generations. It feels like a reflection of broader societal issues—cultural appropriation, stereotyping, double standards, and a dip in authenticity. Curiously, this shift aligns with the rise of hip-hop and rap in the 1990s, and then the internet boom of the 2000s brought it all into the mainstream. With platforms like Twitter (now X), Instagram, Vine, and TikTok, suddenly we were swimming in a sea of new phrases and abbreviations.
I get that language evolves—it's natural! But to me, the sloppiness and disregard for proper English, along with the rampant use of slang that twists spelling and pronunciation, is downright ridiculous. I remain committed to the language I grew up with, sticking to the correct pronunciations and spellings that were instilled in me. There’s something to be said for holding onto the roots of language, don’t you think?
Seconded, good sir!