An Ever-growing List of My Pet Peeves
Just to be clear, lest people get the wrong idea and think that I'm some negative depressed asocial prick that just hates everything and everyone... I'm really not. I'm actually quite happy with life. I think I remain so because I like to vent and I vent often. It's the people that bottle all of their angst up inside that one day go postal. And as you will be able to tell by reading this rant, I clearly have no bottled-up angst. Now on to the list...
- People chewing with their mouth open. This includes the smacking of lips because said mouth flew open while eating or chewing gum. Also included is talking with your mouth full.
- People that must make as much noise as possible while walking around in public (or business) areas. This includes whistlers, singers, mumblers, hummers, pen clickers and pen chewers, and loud talkers (especially on cell phones). Also in this group are people that drive around cranking their music up as loud as it will go. Do we really need to hear your crappy music from a block away?
- People who throw their cigarette butts out their car windows. I don't know why many/most smokers seem to think this is not littering, but it is. In California I watched a small fire start because someone through a butt out their window.
- People that say NO in conversation then repeat what you just said back with a slight change. For example: You: "Did you drive your car here?" Them: "NO, I don't drive a car. I drive a truck."
- Every single thing about (the amazingly awful experience that is) flying on an airplane these days.
- People that stand too close behind you in lines so if you move back an inch you bump into them.
- Drivers that don't signal.
- Drivers that sit in the fast lane going 10mph under the speed limit, while periodically swerving, because they are talking on their cell phone. A habit that will probably one day be illegal.
- Liars and the lying lies they tell. This includes a lot of sales people's entire existence [apologies to my coworkers ;-)]. And BTW, withholding information you know the other person would want to know is also lying. Am I the only one that was taught this growing up? — and from a 60's era mom no less. I even think prices on things should include all taxes like it does at the gas station. If we only had a fixed sales tax to worry about it would be pretty easy to figure out. But these days there are various other taxes that get added on that you might not have known about before you decided to buy something — especially if you are a tourist. Some examples are hotel taxes, environmental taxes, utility taxes, etc.
- The overuse of the word literally. As of late people literally use the word literally too much! Even worse is when someone uses it when they really mean figuratively. For example: "I literally died of embarrassment!"
- The word irregardless which is erroneously used for emphasis when regardless is what is really meant.
- The phrase "I could care less" when "I couldn't care less" is what is meant. And for those that are confused by this, if you could care less, then you must care some, while if you couldn't care less, you are at the lowest possible level of caring already. More on this here. And if you think you can defend it by claiming it's supposed to be sarcastic, this site does a good job of explaining why it isn't.
- People that announce to the world every skill they think they are good at. Which, usually means they are only OK at it, and sometimes they actually suck at it. At best, they are better at the ascribed skill then their peers, but this usually doesn't mean much. People who announce that they are really good drivers usually fall into this category. Admittedly this happens in bars far more than any other locale, so it might be more of a people + beer phenomenon. I'm guessing that a lot of these people fall into the being unskilled and unaware of it camp as well. And as for me personally, well if I was any more humble I'd be perfect ;-).
- People that state the obvious as though they're passing on to you some great insight. No examples, just use your imagination.
- Similar to this are platitudes in all forms and the people that spout them. There are many examples of this, but they all have one thing in common, just like the previous peeve, they're all obvious, meaningless, and condescending.
- People that take a trait that most people possess and state it like they are somehow special. An example is: "I'm very competitive." — yeah, I don't know a single person that is not very competitive. In fact you are probably either homeless, on welfare, or very competitive. Another example is: "I really really like chocolate!" — probably 95% of the population really really likes chocolate. Maybe people should just announce when they don't like chocolate and when they are not competitive — that would be more interesting.
- He/him vs she/her in modern written English. You don't need to alternate between using he/him and she/her or using s/he or some such. Just use the they/them combination instead. So, "After person does this, he can do that by himself." becomes "After a person does this, they can do that by themselves." They/them may refer to one or more people and so it is correct to use. Why almost no one writes this way is beyond me.
- The practice of writing sentences having an and list and not including the last comma. For example: "Counting is easy as one, two and three." Instead of: "Counting is easy as one, two, and three." I was taught to do it the second way, but it seems that a lot of people were taught the first method. This would be fine except for two things. One is, the comma is both a divider and a pause in a sentence. When you say the words "...one, two, and three" you pause after the "two", and therefore a comma is needed after it. The second reason is apparent when the list is more complex. Take a list of families that are invited to an event (each family may have many members). You might write/say the list like: "Attending will be: John and Marry, Rick, Sally, and Tom, and Bob and Sue." This would imply a grouping of "John and Marry", "Rick, Sally, and Tom", and "Bob and Sue". However, if the last comma is removed from the outer and inner lists it reads: "Attending will be: John and Marry, Rick, Sally and Tom and Bob and Sue." We've now lost any ability to tell which people are grouped together, in fact I'm pretty sure the last sentence is not proper English. I've read sentences written similar to this and been very confused.
After the age of 18 all social safe guards need to be removed. You need to let Darwinism kick in before people start to breed.
— Kyle Sherman