Ooh, ooh, I have some.
Verbal fudge-ups:
- Turrent instead of turret, "squirl" instead of squirrel, "melk" instead of milk,
- generally instead of genuinely,
- people who think "then" and "than" are interchangeable,
- literally when people mean practically/figuratively/virtually. I listened to a radio talk show where some woman was saying "after our breakup, I was literally in pieces". What, your husband was an axe murderer? Don't abuse the English language, you silly cow.
- arcs instead of ask (that may be unique to the part of London I live in).
- pressurised when people mean pressured - "I was pressurised into doing overtime" - what, the boss came up and physically squeezed you?
- misunderstood/bungled phrases like "it's a doggy dog world", "walah" (instead of voila), "persay" (instead of per se), "more and less", "ect" instead of etc, "verse" instead of versus, "wet your appetite", "low and behold", "for all intensive purposes", "escape goat" instead of scapegoat...
- I have a special hatred for verbal cliches or puns that have become so overused that people no longer really know what the originating phrase or context was and the modified form becomes its own phrase. Like, "the eyes have it" in the context of a mascara advert.
- Here's one that used to infuriate my brother, but only partially justifiably. The use of "but" to imply "almost". "The man was found all but dead" - ALL but dead? What, so he was also singing, dancing, cartwheeling, basically exhibiting every behaviour associated with people who AREN'T dead? Of course the word "but" has multiple meanings so the example is technically fine, but it still sounds counter intuitive.
- Mixing exact and indistinct units. When a game is advertised as having "Over 14 playable characters!" I want to ask, how many, 15? 16? If we were rounding to the nearest 10 or even the nearest five it'd be fine to be vague, but why give us an exact, unrounded integer and then vaguely say "over"?
- Repeatedly pluralising. The word "texts" is already a plural, you don't have to say "I sent three textses". When I worked in a clothes shop I sometimes had customers asking where the "vestses" were.
Movie physics:
- Audible explosions in space.
- When a movie shows a planetary alignment and the planets are all neatly lined up like a row of tennis balls, completely disregarding their relative sizes or the massive distances between them (I'm thinking that shitty Lara Croft film).
- Related: big objects that stay big regardless of distance. Like in the end sequence of Sonic Adventure 2, the Death Egg orbits the Earth and passes out of view behind it - at a visible size that would imply it's the area of Asia.
- Some dude fires off a salvo of bullets, the action slows down Matrix-style and the bullets are all traveling together like a swarm of bees. Bullshit! Take an Uzi: 600 rounds/min, muzzle velocity 400 m/s. There'd be a 40m gap between each bullet.
- Zero inertia. Iron Man just fell from space into concrete, but he's wearing his suit, so it's OK! No, he should be pulp inside his (intact or otherwise) suit. Same with scifi, every time a ship goes to Warp or Lightspeed or whatever the crew should become a 2D layer on the aft bulkhead. I know Star Trek has "inertial dampeners" for this, but still...
- The anime-originated thing where a phenomenally sharp sword cuts through a person or a monster and they carry on walking for a moment before the two halves slide apart. It's just silly, it's like when Wile E Coyote walks off a cliff and only starts falling when he realises there's no ground under him. Well, OK, that I could concede to being a stylisation or artistic license. But when the person/monster splits apart and there's a few intact strands of viscera/mucous connecting the halves of the torso... that makes no sense. Did the blade cut through, or didn't it?
