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Intergenerational cycles of peeving?

In a recent article in Psychology Today, Nick Morgan proposes a new theory about the psychodynamics of prescriptivist peeving ("Why Bad Grammar Activates Our Fight-or-Flight Response", 12/14/2023): Does grammar matter? And did you have a teacher in your youth who insisted on drumming the rules of good grammar into you—and was that teacher on the […]

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Where have all the peevers gone?

Back in the fall of 2022, I asked "What happened to all the, like, prescriptivists?". I still don't have any actual counts, but I continue to find fewer instances of prescriptivist peeving in my various media feeds and foraging.

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Self-owning peeve of the week: Compersion

Email from Florent Moncomble [links added]: A few months ago, the distinguished member of the Académie française Alain Finkielkraut was featured in a video where he deplored the loss of “a word which used to exist in the [French] language and disappeared from it”, ie. “compersion”. Apparently, little does he know that “compersion” was actually coined […]

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This week's display of ignorant peeving

David Ulin, "I Can’t Stand These Words Anymore", The Atlantic 12/30/2020: Recently, I noticed a headline in The New York Times that featured the word tasked. This is among my least favorite rhetorical strategies—the verbing of the noun. Contemporary American English is rife with such constructions: to journal, to parent, to impact, to effect. I wince a […]

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Peeving and changes in relative frequency

What follows is a guest post by Bob Ladd. When I lived in Germany in the early 1980s, I bought a few style guides in the hope of improving my written German. One of them turned out to consist primarily of what I would now (as a long-time Language Log reader) recognize as ‘peeving’ – […]

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Il congiuntivo: Peeving and breeding, Italian style

As a counterpoint to "Peeving and breeding", 3/4/2018, here's Lorenzo Baglioni's "Il Congiuntivo":

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Peeving and breeding

Today's SMBC explores an important issue:

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Uninformed peeving reappears

I was just about to write a post about how pundits seem to have given up on ignorant peeving about "new" usages that are actually decades or centuries old, when Victor Mair sent me a link to Alex Beam, "Words we can live without", Boston Globe 12/23/2016. And Mr. Beam is a worthy heir to […]

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Peeve map abandoned

Alison Flood, "Oxford Dictionaries halts search for most disliked word after 'severe misuse'", The Guardian 8/26/2016 The #OneWordMap, an online survey soliciting readers’ least favourite words, is abandoned after site is flooded with offensive choices It was intended to be a lighthearted quest to find the least popular word in the English language, but only […]

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"Offhand impressions and grumpy peeves"

Steven Pinker, "On my radar", The Guardian 8/23/2015: 4|Website: Language Log. Do you notice grammar gaffes, wonder about the speech styles of celebrities, find yourself curious about the origin of new words and constructions? Language Log is the place to go for commentary by people who actually know their stuff – linguists and other language […]

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Assortative peeving

Girls With Slingshots for 12/23/2014:

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"Due to" and the Conservation of Peeving

From Megan Stone, via Heidi Harley: A friend of mine, who was an English major with me in undergrad, runs the Twitter account for MBTA, the Boston public transportation system.  This morning, she posted the following:  “#MBTA #OrangeLine Svc is suspended at DTX due to a Medical Emergency. For Green Line Svc, please board at […]

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At the Peevers' Jamboree

Alison Flood at Guardian Books extracts a famous author's top linguistic peeves from an interview about how to teach writing ("Stephen King has named his most hated expressions. What are yours?", 9/15/2014), The Atlantic’s fantastic interview on teaching, writing and reading with Stephen King is well worth reading in full. […] But perhaps the most interesting part is […]

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