To invite the grammar and language pedants to share their pet peeves?

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AIBU to feel annoyed when I see people say Slither instead of sliver? It was even in a book I read recently. A slither of cake. No! That makes no sense, unless the cake’s been trodden into the carpet!

Also see: step foot in instead of set foot in

There’s plenty of others but those will do for now.

Admittedly not.

But lots of words change meaning over time. Or indeed can reverse meaning.

People pronouncing marshmallow 'marshmellow' really annoys me for some reason.

They might be referring to the "American DJ and record producer" 🤣

I'm a bit late to jump on to this, but here goes. There's a subtle difference between 0.5 and a half. A half is exact, it's one divided by two. Unless you're talking purely about numbers, it's usually one of something divided by two. So the question is, what's the something?

If you're talking about a million pounds in normal conversation, it's vanishingly unlikely that you mean exactly a million, no more or less. It's much more likely that you're taking the million as your focus. By contrast if you said 'a million, two hundred and ten thousand, one hundred and three pounds' then a single pound is your focus. Adding 'and a half' means another half million in the first case and another half pound in the second.

This is reminding me of significant figures. There's no difference in value between 1,000,000 and 1,000,000.0 but they carry different information and therefore have subtly different meanings.
1,000,000 - at least one significant figure but I can't tell for sure how many.
1,000,000.0 - eight significant figures because the final zero after the decimal point doesn't have to be there, its only purpose is to say that there are definitely no tenths. The intermediate zeros now give real information instead of being just place holders so they become significant too.

Pedantry and number theory together, all my Christmases have come at once 😁.

@MontyDonsBlueScarf It doesn't matter what you're talking about; currency, people, litres of water, whatever. "A million and a half" is 1,000,000.5, and "one and a half million" is 1,500,000. It cannot be otherwise because those are the correct names for these numbers.

How are 1/2 and 0.5 different ? They are the same thing

Half of something isn't the same as 1/2

I dont understand your post at all

Not in pounds it's not. It's a million pounds 50! Do you say 'one and a half pounds'? Or 'One pound and a half'? Or do you say 'One pound 50' (like literally everybody else would)?

@cyvguhb this is going to be tricky to explain but I'll try. First of all, there's no difference in value between a half and 0.5 so in that sense they are indeed the same.

However, a half is a countable number and 0.5 is not. This is because you could arrange all the possible fractions in the universe in a way that would enable you to tick them off one by one - that's the first one, that's the second one, and so on - and you could be sure you weren't missing any. Essentially you set up a grid with 1,2,3,. along the top and down the side. Every possible fraction has its own unique place. You then start to count them diagonally.You'd never come to the end but you'd be steadily counting. Here's a diagram which might help. https://www.homeschoolmath.net/teaching/rational-numbers-countable.php.

You can't arrange all the possible decimals in the universe in the same way because there are too many possibilities for the next one in the arrangement.

So a half and 0.5 have the same value but they don't have the same properties. They're not exactly the same in all respects. A bit like a 50p coin and 5 10p coins. They have the same value but they're not quite the same thing.

Edited to try to correct it to 'you'd never come to the end ' but for some reason it's not letting me change it.

The point isn't what I'd call any amount ending in 50p.
I would say "one and a half million pounds" when talking about £1,500,000 because "a million and a half pounds" is an entirely different number of pounds and therefore incorrect.

@TaborlinTheGreat I feel you're missing the point that numbers have more than one role in life. In the abstract they're just numbers, and 1,000,000, 1,000,000.5, 1,500,000 and a million and a half are all different numbers. When they're used to count or measure things then the thing they're measuring has a bearing on how you interpret them.

If you say a child is six and a half it means they're six years and half a year, give or take. That's because you're talking about years and everyone recognises that..

You wouldn't bother to give weeks, days and hours if you were describing someone as six and a half because they're too small to be in your current frame of reference. In the same way 50p isn't in the same frame of reference as hundreds and thousands of pounds. so it's a perfectly reasonable assumption that the half in a million and a half isn't referring to pennies.

I concede that you could be talking about something like painstakingly amassed savings - I finally made it to a million pounds, in fact I overshot by 50p so in a sense I saved a million and a half pounds. That would be correct but in that particular case, but it doesn't mean that a different usage is wrong.

Save Are Kids
We carnt let this go on.

Dreadful. In many ways.

I never understand "If I had of had ..." rather than "if I had". Surely it's just making unnecessary work for yourself, as no-one says "If I had have had ..." in RL.

DEFINITELY 💯
DEFIANTLY Probably auto correct changing it, but it drives me mad !

DEFINITELY 💯
DEFIANTLY Probably auto correct changing it, but it drives me mad !

I think it's when people spell it definately.

The use of 'the' before 'hoi polloi' because 'hoi' means 'the' in ancient Greek.

Homonyms have a lot to answer for. To echo a poster from page one, there their they’re…

But yes, very irritating to read!

Now this is a level of pedantry I would be proud of.

🤯

Surely you mean of which I would be proud 😁

This is the sort of English up with which I will not put!!! 🤣

I’m sure it’s here already, but people who say pacific instead of specific. They also seem to use it excessively.

A bit like people who say Bao buns.
It’s just Bao (which means bun(s))

Alot is everywhere and it does my head in.

PIN number used to annoy ex-H, as the ‘N’ stands for number

Oh yes. And “ATM machine”.