....there was the word "substantial" (which is a measure of how much substance something has) and then there was "substantive", which I only ever came across during debates in the students union. But now I hear "substantive" being used all the time and it's impossible to tell whether it's being incorrectly used to mean substantial or in some different context. I still don't know what substantive means and looking in the dictionary hasn't made things an awful lot clearer. I suspect a lot of the people using it haven't looked.

Decimate is to reduce by one tenth. Common usage seems to mean reduction by a lot more than that.

Oh, and I was once reviewing a series of documents where someone had used demographic when what they meant was geographic.

...irritates me. In physics, it refers to energy level-shift of an electron within an atom, not an enormous, epoch-making change as the term is usually used to denote.

It also grates when people write 'lead' when they mean 'led'.

...I used to confuse 'condone' with 'condemn'. So I'd be talking about some horrific act of cruelty in the news and say that I fully condoned it.

If I had a quid for every time I've heard Bill Beaumont use the word "whereby" when he clearly meant "whereas," well, I'd have enough to buy a small round on the 22nd.

As a bank manager my sister still says dustbinmen instead of dustmen.
BTW when did you last see a dustman carrying a dustbin? they won't even go up my road in this weather.

Things don't "reach a crescendo"; the word means to gradually get louder, not the moment where it hits a peak. Small thing, but it does give me the squirts; a guy I used to work with (who claimed to be a musician) would make the mistake on a weekly basis...

Sometime.
Perhaps she means it this way?

one that is committed by cultural critics all the time especially music critics (even round here) is the the interchangeable use of Coruscate & Excoriate.
But I fear this too is a lost cause much like the classic use of "pacific" when people mean "specific".

I have a friend who constantly uses the word 'quagmire', when he means 'quandary'.

ie - 'Bit of a quagmire. Should I go out or stop in and save money for my holidays'

A colleague wanted to thank me for something I'd done for her and she said she would be 'internally grateful'.

seems strangely common. Why?

I used to run an IT Support team and tasked several of them to write some documentation explaining how the different applications ought to work together.

They all submitted drafts on their various sections detailing how their application 'complimented' the others.

I sent them all corrections including a change to the word 'complemented'. This puzzled the lot of my little gang of Einsteins who all sent back further comments that I'd 'corrected my draft wrong' In the end I had to explain the difference to them. After which one hair-gelled genius piped up, 'But why 'as that word got two diff'rent spellin's?'

a business associate uses this quite often - and bizarrely - uses it quite incorrectly every time.

He uses it to mean the opposite of what it actually does. It's very odd.

For those interested in this sort of thing - and I know I am, may I recommend a book? Kingsley Amis'The King's English was popped into me stocking by the GLW this Christmas and is a witty, erudite joy from soup to nuts.

I was openly mocked the other day for pronouncing 'moustache' as 'mustosh' which I've done, i think, forever. I kind of know how it 'should' be pronounced ('tache and all that) and I wonder if it's a regional thing as I don't have an accent to speak of(I grew up in South Warks).

Does anybody else suffer this terrible affection? (arf! arf!)

I seem to be in a minority of one, but since the world domination of mobile phones EVERYONE AROUND ME seems to mispronounce the following:

A "text" is a "tex"

So "texting" becomes "texing"

And (most infuriatingly) "texts" are known as "texes".

I know I know, as society develops and new behavioural norms take shape it is unhelpful to see language as a static entity and new word forms and vocabulary must be allowed to emerge naturally from common linguistic usage etc etc etc BUT IT STILL GETS MY GOAT.

Phew, glad to get that off my chest.

As I understand it, if canines and felines fell from the sky, you would be entitled to say that "It was literally raining cats and dogs". i.e. if something actually happened that would never normally happen.

But I keep hearing people saying things like "I was literally bored to death", "I literally can't stand him", "it was literally the worst film I've ever seen".

ARRGGHHHH. Makes me cringe.

My colleague at work described the ice and snow as 'traitorous' the other day. Gave me a fit of the giggles.

Another colleague and I have been collecting office based nonsense phrases for a while now. My absolute favourite was when a senior colleague described her position as being 'in a sticky boat' - a wonderful but meaningless combination of 'on a sticky wicket' and something else we couldn't quite work out ('in a boat without a paddle' maybe?)

which invariably describes something that is utter shit.

Maybe stretching the topic a bit, but I can't resist sharing the name a friend of mine struggled to remember. She has a habit of mixing up the names of famous people, and was trying to think of the name of... you know, that scientist guy... the one in the wheelchair....?

"Stevie B Hawkins"

instead of Anything. Why?

Slither. "I had a slither of cake..". It's SLIVER. You see and hear it all the time. Even in decent newspapers.

Annoying Pompeyism.. Reach. Which people use when they mean "retch". I've given up correcting people on that one. It might be a quirk of local pronunciation.

Sea Bass. OK, it's not a mispronunciation, it's a tautology. But it still gets on my tits. In the UK, the bass Dicentrarchus Labrax is a sea fish. You don't get American freshwater large and small mouth bass over here. The freshwater fish of the bass family you do catch here are zander and perch. Which are called zander and perch. It's bass.

instead of "should have". Fucking dullards.

instead of ...Glisters is not gold.

Very annoying as almost everyone says Glitters.

Are not synonyms

Please, please learn the difference.

Also there's no "x" in espresso.

not haitch. H.

Indoors = 'floor'.
Outdoors = 'ground'.

where people make a mistake and ones where they mispronounce the correct word. I don't mind too much the latter particularly in local dialects even if they are a bit grating at times. Working with kids in south London you get used to them torturing the language with their "Spoy-dars" for "spiders" or "grrrls" and "boyze". With my short northern vowels I've been mistaken for everything from a American to an Aussie (they seemingly don't watch Emmerdale in Catford). My toes did curl recently when I heard ASDA pluralised as in "I was in Asdas right and diss boye.." it just seemed needless somehow.

It,s Birmingham City..not Birminum !!

A while ago, I described a work-related document as having too much information. A colleague was amused by this and nodded knowingly -"yes, wayy too much information!", as if I had just shared some detail about my anal hairs.

but inter and intra are commonly misused. Of course, as a lawyer (by training, at least) I am always very careful to use the right one!

I constantly get in arguments when people use the word incorrectly...

irregardless.

In English, the stress is on the first syllable. Not on the fucking second one. Basil Fawlty is allowed to mispronounce it to try and impress a French woman. The rest of us have no excuse.

Fantastic,sublime,genius,ect when It's really rather average.

and ain't instead of isn't.

I must stop going on about this.

These pedant threads are throwing up the same old neuroses, aren't they? I have to mentally check to see if I've ranted on something before.

and one of the cashiers didn't know the difference between the word "denomination" and "domination". It provided some confusion from customers when they took cash out and she asked, "what domination would you like?"

Oh, and the standard your/you're one; the worst offender I know for this one is, worryingly, my Mum.

...anyone who isn't a seismologist using the word epicentre.

...anyone who isn't a mathematician using the word parameter.

I'm sure someone's mentioned this on a thread somewhere before, but there are people who collect these things.

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

I particularly liked "curled up in the feeble position".

"Without further adieu" is something I've heard a couple of people saying regularly, on both occasions with a smug "aren't I eloquent?" look on their faces, which makes it so much more irritating

"nucular energy" is commonly heard, the worst case being when a BBC correspondent used this throughout a feature on that very topic, seriously undermining his credibility on the matter

"trowma" for "trauma" is a classic case of using the pronunciation of the language from which the word was derived - German in this case - presumably to make oneself sound more sophisticated. The correct foreign pronuncation is appropriate if you're using a foreign word which hasn't made it to English yet, my favourite being "zusammengehörigkeit" - the feeling of belonging together. But once a word is in the English language, sorry but we're stuck with the more mundane-sounding English pronunciation.

"begging the question" is a term in formal logic where an argument is proven using a premise which is based on the argument itself, as in the statement "Opium induces sleep because it has a soporific quality". It is almost always used wrongly to mean "raising the question"

And the misuse of "quite literally" to mean exactly the opposite quite literally gets on my tits. Except of course that it doesn't - only figuratively.

Eponymous is the most misused word in music publications, when used to mean self-titled. The correct word is homonymous.

Short "a". It's not Parkistarn in the same way that it is not Arfgharnistarn.

I've even seen both used incorrectly in the same paragraph.

is quite often used instead of pertinent by my manager.

It always grates when I hear someone who wants to "axe" a question - although I realise that has now seeped deeply into current linguistic usage for the younger generation. Still sends a shudder up my spine.

Good to see "pacifically" featuring heavily here too. I also had a friend who consistently used it.

She was a bit of a serial malaprop though. She did her lower back in and saw her osteopath about it. She then went around for days telling people that the she has seen the doctor and he had spent the session manipulating her scrotum because it was all out of place.

Out of place indeed. When I told her that it was almost certainly her SACRUM which was misaligned she simply wouldn't believe it wasn't her scrotum. Had to resort to a concise OED to convince her. It was at that point she confessed that she'd talked about it at length to the vicar and his wife about it that morning!

We once had a secretary who was very, very good but could not get to grips with the correct use of the word 'whom', despite her boss explaining in some detail many, many times.

One day he told her to send some papers across to another firm and she asked "Who to?". Fixed by his steely glare and raised eyebrow she hesitated and then said "Sorry! I mean, who toom?"

"Who toom" is still in regular use in our office.

is a word routinely misused by journalists, usually in live reviews of bands.

Every 3 months I have to produce a report at work which includes details of ethnic origin for people I have had contact with. My colleague who does this with me always calls it ethniticity and seems to have many questions to ask about this particular part of the analysis, much to my irritation.

I had a colleague who ran through a presentation with me outlining "our prestigious new offices in Salford Quays" which he pronounced as "kways". I pointed this mispronunciation out to him only for him to reply "Shit! I've presented this to nearly 100 people and nobody has told me".

This is the same guy who "wears his heart on his shoulder".

of hearing a colleague saying he was weary of doing something when he meant wary.

Often used by those appearing in property porn to describe feelings of surprise, delight, despair, concern, happiness, indifference, unhappiness or scorn, and is ascribed to buildings which are as likely to be too far below their price range as they are too far above, and as ugly as they are er...wowsome.

Every use of "wow" can be deemed incorrect on the grounds that the word itself has been rendered sh*te by these venal, ugg-boot wearing, publicity-addicted Kevin McCloud wannabes.

I'm actually a c*nt.

Idiots.

My poor GLW suffers from this condition. However when she tries to explain it she always insists she is dyslepsic.

was used at work yesterday by a boss to describe the installation of new printers/copiers.

Charles Darwin publishing The Evolution of Species was a paradigm shift. I’m not sure new office hardware is on the same level…

I used to sit within earshot of a young and enthusiastic sales rep whose mouth ran considerably faster than his brain. He didn't so much misuse words as aim for them and fall short.

One of the first times I met him he told be he'd been "running around all day like a blue-arsed chicken."

Over the years I built up a list of his greatest hits. Which I've lost. But I remember these:

I can only give you a ballpoint figure
Her mother died and she's still in grievance
One thing you can't do in business is take your foot off the radar
There's no point us running round all milli-vanilli
My new car's got all the dobbins

"Mum wants a glass of wine and she,s prostate on the sofa.."

I mean how hard can it be. You get uber-berks on any 'top twenty of' programme going on about 'seminal artists' - unpleasant but accurate - and its incredible how often someone then says "His importance cannot be underestimated" or "It is impossible to underestimate his significance". Its really widespread and utterly ridiculous with even a moment's thought. It's actually the death of meaning - like 'performance related bonus' and 'you have to pay to attract the talent' - in BANKING? The biggest failure in history?

It makes me seethe when people use 'unadvisably' instead of 'inadvisably'...grrrr!

(coat)

My dear old dad arrived alone in England at age 14 as a refugee with barely a word of English, and had to learn it well an very quickly. As a result he had little time for people who had it as their mother tongue but mangled it.

One form this took was his kindly but firm correction of shop assistants:

Shop assistant: And that's your one pence change
Dad: One penny change. "Pence" is the plural. The singular is "penny".

and bloody Scalectricks -it's Scalextric!!! Makes me want to slot someone...