This is only one example, but when you look at phrases like ____-ridden, why does the word ridden suddenly suggest some thing’s presence, not absence? When you’re rid of something, it’s gone, you lose it, you get it away from you. The way people use it today seems to suggest not only that it’s there, but that it’s prominent. A war-ridden country is not a country that is plagued by war.
The phrase “could care less.” People say this when they don’t care about something, even though the words themselves suggest that they’re going out of their way to accommodate it. The correct phrase is “couldn’t care less.”
I might be overreacting just a little bit, but this really bothers me. Are people not capable of thinking before they form sentences?
Like Nulani, I have never heard “could care less” without the negative “Not”. It may be that in oral form, the 'nt becomes muted simply as a phenomenon in spoken dialect, but I can’t understand any reason for it being so in the written form unless the writer is attempting to imitate the dialect in question.
Ridden, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is an adjective meaning “dominated, harassed or possessed” which undergoes morphological composition inflection with nouns, like Bed + Ridden = bed-ridden. It’s not in the same word-family as “Rid” (Dispose) in the same way “Ride” isn’t related to the latter.
I never like “Do you mind if…” It just always seems people will answer with both yes and no to mean the same thing.
I also hate it when you’re walking along, see someone you know, you pass each other, and one of you greets the other with “How’s it going” then keeps on walking.
I know it’s a “word” rather than a phrase, but I hate it when people say “irregardless” because IT IS NOT A STANDARD FUCKING WORD! It’s regardless. Irregardless makes no sense- if you have “irr” and “less,” then doesn’t that suggest the opposite of regardless?
Any phrase wherein “u”, “ur”, “r” and “y” are treated as full and proper words. I understand it when used in, say, SMS messages and chats, but when I see it in actual texts smoke starts coming out of my ears.
Same difference simply means that, yes, something is incorrect in what I said, but not in such a way as to change the meaning of what I say so that you can’t understand it.
It’s pretty much a more common form of ‘Semantics’.
