Lexicon Valley is a great podcast by the linguist John McWhorter, who manages to be fun while also being right about everything.
The latest episode is about linguistic pet peeves, something linguists aren’t really supposed to have – it’s unseemly, like communists having brand preferences. But even people who know most linguistic pet peeves are irrational can’t help having some. I certainly do, and while fully acknowledging their irrationality and pointlessness, I still want to kick people in the head when they say “I’ve never stepped foot in Russia” or “We need to examine our own biaseez.” Arrgh, shut up, morons!
Anyway…here are my takes on the pet peeves mentioned in the podcast:
“You just can’t…” As in, “You just can’t lie around the house all day” instead of “You can’t just lie around the house all day.” I think he’s actually too hard on himself for disliking this one, because it’s still the case that many people perceive a difference in meaning between “just can’t” and “can’t just”: “Lying around used to be Bob’s favorite pastime, but now that all his furniture’s been repo’d he just can’t lie around the house!” (poor him) vs. “When are you going to get a job? You can’t just lie around the house,” (you lazy bum). So they’re not interchangeable and it’s fair to be annoyed when the words get out of order.
“Aren’t I?” – Putting a construction promoted by grammar mavens on a list of your pet peeves is a real power move. This particular one also makes me very happy, because I dislike it as well. It seemed vaguely wrong to me when I was child, and there were a couple of times when I said something like “Ain’t I good at swimming?” and got a smackdown from teachers or even other children who were of the “aren’t” party, so I gave up finding an alternative. I still think “ain’t” makes a whole lot more sense, though. Pro tip: avoid the whole problem by asking, “am I not?”
“Shrimps” (or deers, or sheeps). This would have annoyed me in my early youth but I got over it, as our podcast host apparently also did.
Re “Billy and me are going to the store” (not a pet peeve but something he mentions in passing), I disagree with McWhorter about whether that actually makes sense. IMHO if you want “me” in there instead of “I,” it’s got to be “Billy and me, we’re going to the store.” (Cf. the entire French language.) “Billy and me are going…” feels wrong to me in an instinctive way, not a schoolhouse way. (And yes, I know I said before that he’s always right. He’s probably right about this, too…but I still disagree.)
The bigger problem with those “[someone] and I” constructions is that because teachers insist on making everyone put “I” second, it causes people to say stupid things like “Why are you being mean to Candace and I?” So I fully support the right of pronouns to migrate closer to verbs so speakers can remember what case they’re supposed to be in.
“There’s books on the table.” This used to bother me too, but I got over it by studying other languages where there’s no distinction between “there is” and “there are” and yet their speakers appear to be living normal lives. He mentions German (“es gibt”) and Finnish (?) but there’s also Spanish “hay” and French “il y a” and probably a ton of other examples. Shout-out to Italian, though, which still insists on this distinction (c’è una donna vs. ci sono molte donne).
“Can I get [a Coke]?” – Why would that bother anyone? You’re just asking permission to receive something, which he admits. McWhorter’s very good at critiquing his own pet peeves so I don’t have to. Instead, I’ll just say this one reminds me of people who hate “No problem” as a response to “Thank you.” Why? In so many languages, the standard response to “thank you” is essentially “for nothing” or “please [don’t thank me].” “No problem” is firmly rooted in that tradition; it says, “This wasn’t any extra effort, don’t worry about it, you don’t owe me anything, it’s cool.” Whereas “you’re welcome” has always seemed a little smug to me. I know that’s not the intention, but it seems to entail an acknowledgement that you (the person being thanked) actually did something to earn it, when in fact the general consensus (at least among Indo-Europeans) is that you’re supposed to pretend you didn’t. So I support “No problem.”
Everyone hates something about the way other people are using language. My mother hates any new phrase that gains sudden popularity; she used to hate “sea-change” and now she hates “that’s in your wheelhouse.” My sister once spent a good half hour of her life patiently explaining and re-explaining to a mall survey lady why her questions about a product being “very unique, somewhat unique, or not at all unique” didn’t make any sense because things are either unique or not and you can’t modify it (survey lady: “Oh, OK….So, would you say this product was very unique, somewhat unique…”). My kids’ pet peeves are mostly about pronunciation, e.g. expecially. Some people can’t stand to see “fun” used as an adjective, as it was in my first paragraph. How about you? Tell me in the comments.
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