AIBU to say it's not "ect"

[IceCreamWoes]

I've seen about 8 threads in the last 2 days with posters writing ect when they obviously mean etc. I probably am being U but it really does irrationally fucking irritate me!

I need to get out more, yes. I've had two (big) glasses of wine 😂.

So, am I?

I wasn’t asking for advice on what to do, I was posting on a thread in which people are talking about grammatical and linguistic errors made by others.

And she does use these mistakes in her clinical records.

What I meant was signs in shops saying e.g. ‘If you can’t find what you want, please ask a colleague.’ *
To me that means someone I work with, not a member of the shop staff.

Yes, I agree. "Colleague" is a relative term, and it should only be used about a person who is a colleague of yours. To us customers, the staff aren't our colleagues.

@ErrolTheDragon exactly. Since I realised why it's happening, it bothers me less and less. The fact that there actually is a (wrong) logic to it.

Ifeelthesameway · Yesterday 20:59

<strong>SerendipityJane · Yesterday 14:59</strong>
	<span class="italic">If I was was going to be a pedant, I really wouldn't start with a medium </span>				   <span class="italic">where every single app and device is trying to "correct" me. Especially not with Latin abbreviations.</span>

Shouldn’t you use the subjunctive “were”?

Very droll, minister 😀Of course, ideally I should have said "Were I to be a pedant". However the earth still turned, the sun still set, and - astoundingly - it still rose this morning. 😎

Last time I made a lame joke I was shot down in flames so I’ll just say their not doing it on purpose.

Honest.

I'm bothered if it's in contexts where it matters (ie not most MN posts). Or in cases where the writer should have known better. I'm never going to stop ridiculing the Guardian for producing an article in its motoring section (the only one I've ever read, it was for a model I was interested in at the time, so I don't know if it was a one-off) which used 'breaks' instead of 'brakes' throughout.

So rather than saying “I had taken the car keys” they say “I had TOOKEN the car keys”

Sadly this isn’t a one off here and there, they use this word quite often and Judge Judy hates it just as much as I do 😂

Thanks@hoxtonbabe.

Have we had '10 items or less ' yet? Should be fewer.

Does that one seriously bother anyone though? It's perfectly comprehensible.

I wonder if the ultra pedantic think maths and computing should have a 'fewer than' symbol for integers rather than just using 'less than' for everything?

Drives me nuts.
Also 'his' instead of 'he's' (ie his got three kids )

Maybe just me then! But yes, it does annoy me.

Another one…

I hate it when people use quotation marks but then don’t use the verbatim quote, such as he said “he’d never been so hurt before in all his life” - obviously in spoken conversation that’s what they would say but when writing the verbatim quote should be in the quotation marks or else it should be indicated like this: he said “I’ve never been so hurt before in all my life” or he said he’d “never been so hurt before in all (his) life” or indeed just omit the quotation marks altogether.

Starting every sentence with "So..."

Absolutely yes to this!

Has the Amercanized "z" reared it's head yet ?

I wonder whether some of the awful grammar because dumbing down sounds cute to them. Lickle, I done it, somethink, etc etc. it's not. Be proud if you are smart. Let's try and get everyone to be better, to learn. Not go down to nonsense.

I hope not ... I think you're referring to the 'Oxford spelling'?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

Remember the episode of Morse where he was able to figure out the murderer was the posh but not so literate gardener because he used '-ise' rather than '-ize' when writing certain words!

I'm sure, however, Morse appreciated the existence of the etymologically inferior 'ise' version as it's more likely to fit into a crossword than 'ize'.

Arent lickle and keckle just North West dialects?

I live in north west England now, don't think I've ever heard these - other than by little children before they can enunciate properly.

Oh, OK. I have never seen “colleague” used like that.

I suppose at a push if you read the sign as being in the voice of the manager it could work.

In Hong Kong and Singapore, people use “staff” in the singular when speaking English (which many of them are taught from birth alongside Chinese so they are not “learners” as such).

For example
“I could not find the soy sauce so I asked a staff where to find it”

“A staff named Albert Lam was injured while carrying a heavy box”.

When I worked there we were often writing reports for UK clients in which the number of people involved was an important bit of information, so I would always correct to “a member of staff”. None of my junior colleagues ever absorbed the rule, they just kept on using the singular in their drafts. And looked at me blankly when I said things like “unless we are talking about Gandalf’s big stick, you can’t say “a staff”.

Never heard tooken before and never want to again.

My Scottish parents would have said it as a joke, and I think the joke was a gentle imitation of how their elderly relatives spoke.

“Youse have tooken aw the tatties”

(You plural have taken all the potatoes)

It has been adopted to make the interaction seem more cuddly and less hierarchical, even when it makes no grammatical sense.

The corporate I work for uses 'colleague' in the correct sense and also externally to refer to employees. I corrected an externally-facing document from 'colleague' to 'employee' and was overridden on the grounds that it doesn't fit with our 'tone of voice' guidelines. And that's why I never want to do internal comms

"Dessert" meant fruit to me.