Mini-Rant: Based "on" vs. "off of"

Parent Cafe
81

OK, well then, I had a supervisor that often used to say “I just can’t fanthom that!”

I’ve also heard and seen in print, the use of careered - as in: “The truck careered off the road.”**

**I just looked that one up, to make sure it was incorrect, but found that it’s not outside of the U.S. In the U.S, “careened” is more common (and what I thought was correct). I learned something new today.

Idea vs. Ideal

My mother, to this day, says “warsh rag” instead of “wash cloth.”

My daughter pronounces button as: buh - en I’ve teased her and told her “Sweetie I think that word has a “T” in the middle of it”, but for some reason, she has a hard time pronouncing it correctly. She’s 16.

And finally, as an adoptive parent, I get really annoyed when asked “Do you have any children of your own?” Me: Wait! What? Do you mean these kids aren’t mine?

And: “Are they sisters?” My kids: Wait! What? Are you saying we’re not sisters?

82

Dos, I recently reactivated spell-check and its worse than my own typos, lol. Blame it, not age.

83

Probably because it is foot-related, this reminded me of another one: it’s TOE the line, not TOW the line.

Some of the things people have mentioned are not so much mistakes as dialect (“ax” for “ask”) or regional colloquialisms (“needs fixed” for “needs to be fixed”), or even just regional pronunciations (“warsh” for “wash”). My own father pronounced “donkey” as “dunkey.” All of these are different from these new perversions creeping into the language, like “based off of.”

You can see how some of them probably evolve. “He is based out of Mobile, Alabama” could have evolved from “He works out of Mobile, Alabama,” which doesn’t sound quite as bad.

84

“Shoe-in instead of shoo-in.”

Shoed-in but then booted out. :slight_smile:

85

Bad grammar interspersed with plagiarism. It’s painful as well as being really easy to spot.

“the ways in which…” Nine times out of ten “how” is the better choice.

86

Some English dialects (including in England) have this phenomenon, called t-glottalization, where the t sound is replaced by the silent glottal stop.

87

For some inexplicable reason, “invite” has become a noun. But that’s incorrect. You invite some one to a party by sending them an invitation, not an invite. IT DRIVES ME CRAZY!!!

88

Invite is going the way of gift. I don’t like it, I don’t use it, but that horse is out of the barn.

89

@MomofJandL - I’d never thought about “gift”. Of course it derives from “to give”, but I’ve always considered its primary meaning to be as a noun. But as I think about it now, that seems silly, as in “For the special occasion, I’m going to gift my wife a gift”. Thank you for opening my eyes.

Moving forward, I’ll try to amend my speech.

90

We have an old person/younger person thing going on in the family. We discovered this over Thanksgiving. What do you call a little piece of butter - a pat or a pad? All the people over 30 say pat, all the under 30’s say pad. Neither side thinks the other one makes any sense.

91

My real problem with confusing you’re and your is that they aren’t pronounced the same, (in my version of English at least), so it really grates on me when I read it.

I’m sure someone has opinions about parentheses and commas as in the above sentence.

92

I’ve been frequenting a particular sports forum for 20+ years and over the years certain language evolutions have occurred. For example, once long ago a poster was trying to call a player a prima donna and mistakenly wrote pre-madonna. So long time users jokingly refer to players as pre-madonnas sometimes which probably has led to younger readers that have no clue about the history thinking that the word really is pre-madonna.

93

@eyemamom - I prefer calling it a hunk o’ butter :slight_smile:

94

This is pretty common in business-speak for electronic calendar meetings/invitations, at least among the people I work with. “Shoot me an invite” or “Add me to the invite” (or just “Add me”) is a request for the scheduler of the meeting to add a person to the invite list. “Send me a copy of your invite” is a pretty common request too.

95

Of course it’s a pat of butter. I don’t know why. But anyone who disagrees is wrong.

96

I saw an appellate judge rip the head off a lawyer who’d used “it was a grizzly scene” instead of “grisly” in his written argument.

97

Unless it was a bear attack. Then it would be a grisly, grizzly scene. :slight_smile:

98

walla for voila

99

You folks are very tough and very cranky. Some of this is just the normal ebb and flow of usage. I don’t thing there’s a moral dimension to “based off of” vs. “based on.” Or the use of “gift” as a verb. It resolves an ambiguity in the word “give”. I can give you a Rolls Royce after you pay for it, but if I gift it to you it’s clearly not a sale.

I also tend to forgive common auto-correct mistakes. It happens to the best of us.

That said: I can’t stand reign in, instead of rein in. Jeesh.

100

Ending a sentence in a preposition:
Where are you at? Instead of Where are you?

I went out of state to college in Minnesota. Drove me crazy when the Minnesotans I knew would say
“Can you borrow me a pencil.”
My response always was “You may borrow my pencil or I can lend you my pencil but I can’t borrow you anything”