Chiches you want to bitch slap.

[greneknight]

A few of my personal peeves (remember I have a British Civil Service background to draw upon):

* Thinking out of the box

* Blue-sky thinking

* 24/7

* Anyone talking about looking at the larger scale when they mean the bigger picture (increasing the scale actually reduces the size of the picture).

* Anyone talking about looking at the bigger picture.

* Anyone who comes up to a lift on the ground floor and says "are you going up?" (No, we're standing still - it must be you going down!)

* People who use SMS- or text-speak in emails and Facebook messages (why? What's the bloody point? It's not as if there's a limit to the number of characters you can use in an email. LOL.)

* People who look at a watch or clock and say "is that the time?" (No, it's the bloody airspeed velocity of a coconut-laden African Swallow!)

* I'll pray for you

* I've been praying for you

* God did answer the prayers but sometimes the answer's "no"

* Anyone who uses the term 'ad hominem' when they mean 'insult'

Not specifically clichés but which stick in my craw anyway:

Any sentence using words such as:

* Gotten (yes, I'm fully aware that it's a very old English spelling for the past tense of "got", it still creases me)

* Bunch (there are times when this word is a perfectly acceptable collective term for things such as flowers and grapes etc. It's when it gets thrown around as the collective term for everything else that it gets very, very irritating)

* Elevator when you mean lift

* First floor when referring to the ground floor of a building

* Tidbit instead of the genuinely correct but slightly rude titbit

* Rooster instead of cock (for similar historically prudish reasons)

* Aluminum when you mean aluminium; pavement when you mean road; sidewalk when you mean pavement; bum when you mean tramp; fanny when you mean bum; ass instead of arse; etc etc. In fact, when in Britain it can be really important not to confuse the words bum and fanny.

I know there's a whole bunch more but it's a pain in the fanny trying to think the bigger picture out of the aluminum box 24/7.

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Things like "PIN Number" or "ATM Machine" are bloody annoying.

A bit geeky, this one, but in Doctor Who there's a secretive military organisation called UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce - although in Nu-Who, the real UN apparently objected to the use of their inclusion so it was renamed the UNified Intelligence Taskforce). Anyway, it's so irritating every time I see it referred to as UNIT Taskforce.

I find Stimbo very funny but I agree with him. Americans have a funny way of saying things and they can be confusing. I have been to America and I was on a train with my Mum when an announcement went "This train will depart momentarily". My Mum and I looked at each other in bewilderment. I thought there was a technical fault and the train would depart and return to where we were seconds later. I made a mental note of the word and when I got home, I looked it up in my trusty Oxford and it says "momentarily" also means "in a moment" in US English.

As for the cock/rooster thing, it's got a lot to do with Americans being prudish. I read an article in the Guardian once about how you can't say "toilet" in the US. You've got to say "bathroom". Naturally, they cooked up the word "rooster" so they didn't have to use the word "cock". I wonder if the puritans who founded the US had anything to do with this.

In the US, they say "elevator" all the time. And of course their elevators take you to the wrong floor - you have to reduce the floor by one all the time. I've been to Lisbon and they call their lifts "Elevador" (I could have spelt it wrong). Lisbon has very interesting lifts that take you from one road level to another. My dad says it's because Lisbon is built on a hilly land. Oh, and "spelt" is a problem too. I was told in another forum that I spelt "spelt" wrong. I didn't check with them how they would spell it. Perhaps "spelled" which looks weird to me.

Why are they so different? Isn't English the language of England?