What's your MN Niggle

[JackThayer]

Mine is when the thread is something along the lines of "what's your favourite dinner?" Or "Worst holiday you've ever been on?" And OP replies to every single post!

Those can be quite funny. Ditto the ones who know a bit about the topic in question and are having a lovely time presenting themselves as omniscient, till a genuine expert comes along - whereupon they get all huffy.

The Trans / Gender Critical hobbyhorse being shoehorned into every single subject, whether related or not.

I agree. And I'm a regular on the sex and gender boards!

I also dislike the frequent use of “grabby” when we always had a perfectly apt word, which is “grasping”.

I wish that women who are hiding their heads in the sand about the all pervasive assault on women's rights… wouldn’t.

👏

Coming back to this thread because I am newly niggled by something that seems to be getting more common, namely the "only on Mumsnet" put down.

There are so many threads where a few posters make a fairly unexceptional point like "weddings are a bit overblown these days" and then someone else comes along and says "Only on Mumsnet would the wedding police arrive in such force to destroy other people's pleasure in purchasing gold leaf wedding invitation invites" etc etc.

The worst thing about the "only on Mumsnet" thing is that's it's usually so inaccurate.
One poster admits to putting their toilet brush in the dishwasher; 500 posters say "Eeew, disgusting!" but forever after it's: "Only on Mumsnet is it normal to toilet brush dishwasher blah blah..."
Even though it was only one weirdo, no one else.

People not checking the dates of threads. Especially when the OP has only made a post or two and nothing more for pages

Man haters who jump in to insult at every occasion.

I can't abide by "ignore".

As in, the OP has a fairly even 50/50 split of answers, and someone pops up to say, "ignore the naysayers, OP", or, "ignore those who disagree with you".

No, the OP asked for opinions and got them.

Also, when folk reply to the OP, "you sound lovely".

Yes, of course the OP sounds lovely. She's writing about herself, from her own perspective.

The use of DH, DP, DS, DD, whatever, is just about tolerable, until posters start using the abbreviations in slightly random and stupid ways. So you get an OP saying something like the following:

”My boyfriend was out with DD today, and tied her to a tree in the park whilst he read the paper. DD is 18, and I think she is too old to be treated like this.”

And it’s only on the second page that the OP is using DD to mean “dear dog” and not “dear daughter”…

Rambling incoherent posts with poor spelling and grammar and no punctuation. Followed by posts expressing bewilderment and requesting clarification (with varying degrees of politeness). Followed by extremely rude posts saying ‘how dare you - dyslexia/non-native speaker/non-terrestrial being’ etc.

Any thread that starts out interesting but degenerates into a flame war between two posters over nothing at all. I’m sick of these, and really wish mods could take the time to excise the argument from the thread topic and warn both participants.

Just opened a post that started with 'myself' and closed it. Sounds so idiotic.

When a poster expresses dislike of a celeb/TV programme/ advert whatever and someone ALWAYs replies ' well you don't have to watch them/it you know'. Makes me think of a stroppy 6 year old stamping their foot.
It never crosses their mind that someone could be:- flicking channels, have it on in the background or NEWS FLASH choose to watch something and then dare to have an opinion.
Fgs just let that person have their opinion on trivia without inane comments.

The assumption that things like history and religion won't mean anything to children born now.

When people correct people’s spelling/ grammar as if it makes them better than them, there are a lot of people with literacy issues and that sort of thing could put them off from posting/commenting. (And it does not make you a better person to know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’.)

When someone is properly properly at the end of their tether with their dog because eg he’s gone for their child and they say they need to get him rehomed and the poster is torn to shreds. I just find it sad to think someone went on the internet because they couldn’t tell people irl and was so upset and then got told they were an awful human being etc

@stayathomer , there are posts where the grammar and spelling are so bad that it's unreadable. I had a post directed at me today that I think disagreed with what I said but it looked like a jumble of words. It read something like 'also day doesn't following night world whole 24 hours is day' (not the exact words but that level of gibberish)

And it does not make you a better person to know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’.
Not a better person but a better communicator.

It’s the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.

Posting on a thread just to be snobby/show off about themselves when they could just scroll past. You see it a lot on "What should I buy at Aldi?" Type threads, and someone comes along to claim all Aldi veg spontaneously explodes after four seconds in their kitchen and they'd NEVER shop at Aldi. So why post on a thread asking for recommendations from Aldi products?

That stupid feature that offers OP or compact view. It shows part of the OP's post but so little that it's no better than the thread title. It's like music in a restaurant: something no-one ever asked for.

Someone in MNHQ with too much time on their hands.

Pedants who smugly and boringly derail whole thread if OP makes 1 grammatical error

When a man is horrible to their wife:
'is he depressed, OP?'🙄
As if he cant just be an unpleasant person.

The ageism and the enabling of crap men.

And the use of "them" when there is no need to obscure the sex so you don't know how many people are being talked about.

The posters who think they know a lot about language hee-hawing about other people's SpaG and saying that they can't understand a post because of a few errors.

If you seriously a) can't understand your own language because someone else has made some mistakes b) think it's ok to comment, either on the thread, or over on the cesspit of nastiness that Pedants' Corner has become- then the problem is very much you and not the poor fucker who can't spell perfectly.

I've been here since 2004 and never yet seen a post I literally couldn't understand because it was so poorly written, so to those who "literally can't", it might be an idea to see a doctor as you may have some cognitive issues.

Yes I agree. Fair enough if you genuinely cannot understand a post well enough to respond then ask nicely and accepting its a "you" problem.

I do have a few cognitive issues (ME, chemo, not enough sleep etc causing brain fog and falling asleep as I'm trying to read), but they usually don't affect my reading comprehension, or not much.

But I have occasionally found a post on here that I had real trouble understanding (not just here of course, I sometimes find posts like this on other sites as well).

I think it may be partly spelling and grammatical issues, but also a tendency to post in a run-on stream of consciousness style, with sentence fragments and jumping from idea to idea in a way that seems incoherent. The post might have no paragraph breaks, but sometimes every sentence has its own line. That kind of post is pretty rare but it does sometimes happen. I'll try to read it, and sometimes with enough concentration it does begin to make some sense, but sometimes I have to give it up and go on to something else.

I don't comment, though, for the reasons you mention. I don't know if other people have cognitive issues, dyslexia or something else and are finding it hard. I mean I sometimes struggle myself to write coherently, so I should understand. And I am absolutely one of those annoying pedantic fuckers so I have to mentally sit on my hands not to correct things sometimes but so far with success! 😁