What mis-stated phrases or words do you feel still need to be corrected (online or in person) in 2025?
Please state in which country your phrase tends to be used, what the phrase is, and what it should be.
Example:
In America, recently came across "back-petal", instead of back-pedal. Also, still hearing "for all intensive purposes" instead of "for all intents and purposes".
People capitalizing Random Words for emphasis, as if they're Proper Nouns.
Also getting 'a' vs 'an' wrong. It follows pronunciation, not spelling; so it's "a European" and "an honor".
Americans saying "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less".
I’ve seen so many attempts at justification for that one online but I can’t help but think that those people just don’t want to admit that they’re wrong.
I say “I couldn’t care less”, but I used to think that “I couldn’t care less” was used in context where someone seemed like they don’t care and they give that as a snarky remark, implying that they can care even less.
I also like the bonus "hold down the fort" at the end.
Because as you know, it's an inflatable hover fort and, once relieved of my weight, it might float off into the sky.
Came here to share this one too
I agree that this is very vaguely irritating, but for me it only differs by one sound and a vowel quality
"I couldn't care less" [aɪ̯.kɘ̃ʔ.kɛɹ.lɛs] vs "I could care less" [aɪ̯.kɘ.kɛɹ.lɛs]
I care a tiny bit. I could care less, but not easily.
I could care less, but then I wouldn't care at all...
Idk why hoes mad at you this is the cleverest way to mix up the saying while keeping it's intent.
I say “I could care less” and then follow it up with, “but I’d be dead”. Correcting “I could care less” is dumb because you literally can care less about lots of stuff, but saying the phrase indicates you just don’t really care.
Doesn't this make sense if someone says it in a sarcastic manner?
No
"Could of..."
It's "could have"!
Edit: I'm referring to text based things, like text and email. I can pretty much ignore the mispronouncing.
I think they just heard could've or meant to say could've
Also they're/their, your/you're, here/hear, to/too.
It's definitely a mistake, but I think it has slipped by because spell check wouldn't have a reason to mark it, and not everyone uses grammar check, so they think it's correct to spell it out by the sound of the contraction.
That's a dialectal difference, not an error.
Not when written
It's very much not recommended, and generally seen as an error. But this article puts an asterisk on it.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/whats-worse-than-coulda
Please state what country your phrase tends to be used
Please state in which country your phrase tends to be used...
Casey Point
This reply deserves to be put on a peddle stool
Touché
Worst Case Ontario
Get two birds stoned at once!
Haahahhaahahhahahahahaahaah
Reminds me of "Worse case scenario"
Worser cast scenario.
Thanks! I'll be using that from now on.
English/US - seeing “would of” instead of “would’ve”or “would have”. This one bugs me the most.
The thing is that, at least in the UK, many people also say "of". You might say that in quick speech it's not possible to tell between "would've" and "would of" which is probably where this misspelling came from, but I once was talking to my English friend and after he said something quickly, I asked if he just said that "she would see it?", to which he replied "she would OF seen it" putting a lot of emphasis on that "of", making it clear that he wasn't aware that it should be "have".
"Chomping at the bit". It's champing at the bit. Horses champ.
"Get ahold of". It's "get hold of" or, if you must, "get a hold of"
"I'm doing good". No, Superman does good. You're doing well.
“Chomping at the bit”. It’s champing at the bit. Horses champ.
Wow, this is the first time I've ever heard of this one! Good job to you and this thread!
My favorite of these mnemonics (try spelling that from memory) for these arbitrary distinctions was in a movie that had some evil lords in it. The father way telling the son,
"Pheasants are hung, peasants are hanged."
You do things on purpose or by accident, you don't do anything on accident.
For non native English speakers (such as myself), these things can get tricky. It can be difficult to know which preposition is right especially when in relation to non-tangible concepts such as time, accidents, or purpose. Please do correct them though, people eventually learn with repetition.
Look, I've been speaking English for work and pleasure for thirty years now and I'm here to tell everybody that prepositions in English are arbitrary conventions and it's all mostly fair game.
Unless you are trying to precisely identify the position of an object relative to something else, the "correct" preposition is a few years of consensus away from changing.
Our language is the offcuts of several others stitched together, to make some sort of coherent garbage.
Never feel bad about getting something wrong - most of the natives butcher it in their daily lives without a second thought.
The accents are wild too. I feel so sorry for new speakers that are confronted with Scots. The further north you go, the more unintelligible it gets to the basic English speaker.
I'm from Angus originally (not the very top, but close enough), but moved to Wales. There was a period of time where I could understand everyone, but found myself not understood by others.
Eventually my own accent settled into some sort of "Scwelsh" that works, but it's difficult for listeners to place me geographically.
Have a few bonus Welshisms for your trouble:
"I do do that I do" - I also do this
Whose coat is that jacket? - Who owns this coat?
Now in a minute - Could be immediately. Could actually be in a minute. Could be an hour from now.
I definitely understand that. But none of this thread is trying to hold non native speakers' feet to the fire.
I hope you know of that phrase. I just realized that's a saying that might not translate.
You're right, English is dumb, but I'd say 95% of the time it's native English speakers I hear getting this particular one wrong.
Sometimes I do things off purpose.
This, I can accept.
... or by purpose.
I do things with purpose.
There is no fucking s at the end of "anyway"
I thought that was the case with "toward", but apparently "towards" is fine too. Depends on where you are which is more common.
Sometimes there is
Idiots misspelling lose as loose drives me up the wall. Even had someone defend themselves claiming it's just the common spelling now and to accept it. There, their, and they're get honorable mention. Nip it in the butt as opposed to correctly nipping it in the bud.
Pretty sure it's "Feral Intensive Porpoises"
Former colleague used to say "for all intensive purposes"every few sentences.
“Toe the party line” To align with the interests of a political party; to get in line with the agenda of the leader of a political party
“Tow the party line” Something to do with tugboats
TIL
I always heard people use it as a synonym for pushing the envelope (like you're walking right up to the line and prodding it with your toe), and only found out the "falling in line" meaning later. I still see tons of that usage today, and I wonder where it came from.
Britain I think?
Discreet vs Discrete used to crack me up on dating sites. All those guys looking for discrete hookups - which kind of makes sense but I am sure is not what they meant.
I literally ground my teeth today because I got an email from a customer service person saying "You're package was returned to us". Not a phishing email with an intentional misspelling, a legitimate email for a real order I made. If it is your JOB to send messages like this they ought not have misspellings.
So the context matters to me. I am more tolerant of spelling errors and mis-phrasing in everyday life than in a professional communication.
Irregardless
Irregardless.
Without regardless
Without without regard
With regard
I'm going to end my emails with irregardless and see what happens. What's the worst that can happen?
"Irregardless, MajorMajormajormajor."
I'm writing with regards to the issue of...
That's very friendly and I'll be sure to forward your regards...🙄
This is literally a restaurant near me. Quite good one too
affect vs effect.
the usual case for effect is as a noun, and for affect, as a verb.
This is the one that drives me crazy when I see it.
Just to clarify the exceptions to the general rule:
effect as a verb: to cause or bring about
This policy effects change.
affect as a noun: a display of emotion
She greeted us with warm affect.
Personally I would jsut deprecate the word "affect" entirely. Same with "inflammable" and "cleanse."
"Inflammable means flammable? What a country!"
There are three uses for each, intertwined.
Good luck.
I'm only aware of affect as verb or noun and effect as verb or noun. What are the other two?
Edit: Haha, I can see why people get confused now. I just looked at the dictionary page for effect, and it's hilariously long and complicated: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effect
"The weather can affect/effect your mood"
Both correct. Both mean the same thing.
While the second one is somewhat correct, they don't mean the same thing.
"The weather can affect your mood." -> The weather can change your mood, i.e., you had one mood before, and another mood after the weather affected it.
"The weather can effect your mood." -> The weather can bring your mood into being, i.e., you had no mood before, but you had one after the weather effected it.
imo, for this to mean the same thing "mood" has to change meanings in between.
I've been told which is which 50 times and in 12 seconds I'm gonna have no fucking clue again so I'll just pretend effect is the only option.
Here's one mnemonic l: most of the time effect is a noun, which use articles a/the. "The" ends with e and effect starts with e, so "the effect" lines up the e's.
Or you could try RAVEN: remember affect verb, effect noun
My pet peeve is when people use "then" but they actually meant to use "than". I think it might be mainly due to flaws in predictive text on phone keyboards though.
Fuck yes. Most annoying mistake in English. Seems to have sharply risen during the last few years
More then a few made the mistake back than, too.
It's one of those ones that bother me too as a non-native speaker, they're such different words from each other when you learn them more from reading than oral exposure. The they're/their/there trio is another one where I can't fathom how people have issues distinguishing them.
Also, the vanishing use of countable quantities: they are all amounts nowadays.
We can make it a word though :)
Yeah, words aren't determined by dictionary committees or English teachers. They are determined by people using and understanding them.
All languages (other than ones designed deliberately, like Esperanto, Klingon, and Tolkien's elvish) started from the same root and diverged when populations reduced regular contact and all words and grammars were made up along the way.
Using "racking" instead of the correct "wracking" in "wracking my brain". Not very common, but it annoys me... But not as much as "could of"... That is the worst, just stop it!
This is online and in person in Canada.
Using weary/wary interchangeably. I am tired of people not being aware of the difference.
Also, "decimated". The original usage is to reduce by one tenth. It didn't mean something was nearly or totally annihilated, but thanks to overuse, now it does.
That “decimated” ship has sailed. The common usage changed long ago so getting pedantic about the original meaning does not help.
We didn’t have internet then but we do now. This is exactly what we need. It’s good to have flexibility for new words, for slang, even new meanings but let’s make sure mistakes don’t change the meaning of things
I mean, having one in ten of your fellow soldiers murdered by their own commander is pretty horrific, and I think that's the spirit of its modern usage.
Must have been great for morale.
/s just in case
I hear 'weary' used in place of 'wary', I don't think I've come across the reverse. Drives me crazy though.
Yep. This is the one. It irks the heck out of me when people are saying something to the effect of "I had a bad experience once, now I'm tired and fatigued about this situation in the future."
Or "I would be worn out, like after a long hike or something, about things that sound too good to be true, folks! Be careful!"
Agghhh! Lol. I get English can be awfully confusing sometimes but I've been seeing this one pop up a LOT more recently.
(Dis)honors also go to "loosing my keys" or "being a stealthy rouge"
Aisle. As much as I would love to take a boat to the breakfast food isle (a.k.a. island), I'm pretty sure that I need to look in the breakfast aisle at the grocery store.
This one never gets me anywhere, but “begging the question” is actually a logical fallacy where you assume the result and use that as the basis of your argument. Otherwise, it raises the question.
The same goes for the exception that proves the rule. People use it as a magic spell that does away with unwanted evidence but it's self explanatory. No parking on Fridays means you can park every other day.
How do you feel about other words or phrases that have different meanings in specific fields vs common use? Like a scientific theory is very different from your buddy's theory about what the movie you watched meant. Since beg is a stronger word than raise, some statements scream out for questions in response, while others merely give rise to some further need for clarification.
"You can't have your cake and eat it" The older form was flipped: "you can't eat your cake and have it" They both can mean about the same, but the older form makes it much clearer - if you've eaten your cake, you no longer have it. But you could have your cake, then eat it.
Reminds me of that story where a fellow on the lake was chilly and tried to start a small fire in the boat, but it just burned a hole through it and he had to swim to shore.
Just goes to show you...
"You can't have your kayak and heat it, too."
Thank you! I've always heard the former and never felt it quite made sense. Now I understand why.
Mr Kaczynski? I thought you were dead?
To "step foot on". I don't care that millennial journalists are now sullying the literal NYT with this, it's WRONG. It's to set foot on. To SET foot on.
Step foot I'm stuck!
Wh... What are you doing, step-toe?
"Set foot" might be better established (and sound better), but "step foot" is not new.
Yeah yeah I know. But "set" (fun fact: it's the word with the most meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary) is the transitive form of "sit", so it's more grammatical, more elegant and shorter than "step". Which obviously comes from a mishearing by someone who didn't read books, yet people will still get indignant and claim that it's somehow better! I need to lie down. ;)
Those mis-stated phrases are called eggcorns. They’re a fascinating contributor to the evolution of language.
The term egg corn (later contracted into one word, eggcorn) was coined by professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum in September 2003 in response to an article by Mark Liberman on the website Language Log, a group blog for linguists.[5] In his article, Liberman discussed the case of a woman who had used the phrase egg corn for acorn, and he noted that this specific type of substitution lacked a name. Pullum suggested using egg corn itself as a label.[6]
Ah! I'll read this over dinner.
Bone apple tea! :p
There’s a video on it! https://youtu.be/F12LSAbos7A
"flush it out" instead of "flesh it out" when designing a plan
Sometimes you just need to send some dogs into that meeting and shoot the first plan that comes flying out.
"Let's flush out this design."
"You got it!" [Slowly readies a grenade.]
I, too, like to abort all my ideas onto the page...
Idk if this counts as a phrase, but on the internet, people talk about their pets crossing the rainbow bridge when they die. That's not how the rainbow bridge poem goes. Pets go to a magnificent field when they die. They are healed of all injury and illness. When you die, they find you in the field and you cross the bridge together. It's much sweeter the way it was written than the way people use it.
On accident, it is by accident. 🤬
It's "I didn't taste it, let alone finish it." not "I didn't finish it, let alone taste it.". Not those exact words, of course. People get it wrong more often than not IME. The wrong version never makes sense, and it always trips me up.
Oh man, "let alone" is severely misused. Good one!
Don't think I've seen that myself, but that would be pretty fucking annoying for sure.
"If worse comes to worst..."
In British English, they often say the phrase as "if worst comes to worst," which is based on archaic grammar.
In the US, there's a mix of verb tenses. The only one that make sense in this day and age is "if what is worse comes to be the worst," or "if worse comes to worst."
This point can be argued, but I will be severely wounded (maybe not so much as dying) defending this hill.
The only one that continues to bug me is using "an" instead of "a" before a word that starts with a consonant sound. I especially dislike the phrase "an historic" (as in "it was an historic victory") which has bafflingly been deemed acceptable. Unless you're a cockney, it should be "a historic". The rule is to use "an" if the word starts with a vowel sound, and "a" otherwise. IMO.
it sounds like yunicorn, so it's a unicorn, not an unicorn.
Ah, thank you! This one bothers me too. I've seen even more blatant misuses in writing, even in professional writing, but unfortunately can't recall any examples.
I’ve mentioned this here before but in the UK “an historic” is written because we are slowly dropping the letter “h” at the front of words from pronunciation. UK people often say “an ‘istoric” so it kinda makes sense… but looks clumsy.
I follow Jeremy Clarkson and intentionally always use the wrong one. There’s an horse. A apple.
Ditto.
I believe this comes from people trying to show off their education. Traditionally, words with a french descent were pronounced with a silent H. So for example hospital (from French hôpital) is an hospital, where hound (from Germanic hund) is a hound.
This is pretty much deprecated these days and anyone enforcing it is beyond grammar nazi, but it's interesting to know the pattern.
Source: my secondary school English teacher.
Well hell, I use "an" before historic, every time.
It’s fine if you drop the letter “h” when you speak - like I do. It then becomes “an ‘istoric” and sounds correct.
People using 'yourself' and 'myself' instead of 'you' and 'me' when trying to sound formal or posh. You don't sound formal or posh, you sound ill-educated.
I remember once being on a call with some customer support guy who didn't seem to even be aware that words "you" and "me" exist. My favourite part of the conversation was when he said "let myself put yourself on hold while I ask a senior colleague to clarify this for myself".
Have you a merry little Christmas, commoner.
Forsooth, methinks you are aright.
Some weirdos write decades as possessive. Writing "90's" implies that there's a 90 that owns something.
It's not a decade thing. People do that anytime they're not sure if it's a "s situation" or a "ies situation", or confusing with some other plural problem.
I feel like the vast majority of people online use "yay or nay" instead of "yea or nay".
Because English is inconsistent and ass
"per se" (US) - people generally use it as "exactly" or "specifically", e g. "It's not circular, per se, more like a rounded rectangle". However, it actually means "in and of itself". I have a coworker that misuses this one constantly (and also spells it incorrectly) and it's become a huge pet peeve.
Huh TIL I've been using per se wrong. Thanks stranger!
Because of South Park, I occasionally end sentences with that phrase, per se.
This is one of those ones that's taken on it's own meaning, unfortunately, if you're a fan of what it originally meant.
Same with "peruse." People normally mean browse through a selection, but it originally meant examine thoroughly.
Or "fortuitous" which used to mean purely "by chance" but now means "by happy chance".
Using loose instead of lose.
I'm losing friends for loosing dogs on useless losers' loose use of lose and loose
Online in general: using "reductio ad absurdum" as a fallacy.
It's a longstanding logical tool. Here's an example of how it works: let's assume you can use infinity as a number. In that case, we can do:
∞ + 1 = ∞
And:
∞ - ∞ = 0
Agreed? If so, then:
∞ - ∞ + 1 = ∞ - ∞
And therefore:
1 = 0
Which is absurd. If we agree that all the logical steps to get there are correct, then the original premise (that we can use infinity as a number) must be wrong.
It's a great tool for teasing out incorrect assumptions. It has never been on any academic list of fallacies, and the Internet needs to stop saying otherwise. It's possible some other fallacy is being invoked while going through an argument, but it's not reductio ad absurdum.
I really hate it when us media uses the word "ouster".
For example:
"Vail Resorts shareholder calls for ouster of CEO, CFO and Rob Katz"
They mean to use the word here as "removal", but "oust" is also a verb and "ouster" would be "one who ousts".
So, calls for the ouster of the CEO/CFO to do what?
I think the ouster is supposed to be the event that results in ousting. But it's so redundant it's not funny. Removal would be for much better.
What I really hate is when people don’t capitalize the abbreviation US, because it makes me think they’re saying “us” as in “we,” or “oui” as the French like to say, no?
😀
I gotta correct myself when I do it because I'm not from the US so us and US aren't even the same people.
OK, since you mentioned the media, putting "gate" after any government scandal. Nixon's scandal was involving the Watergate Office Building.
They could just use "ousting"
Yup!
i feel like we should be able to beat the living shit out of people intentionally spreading political misinformation.
Like im sorry, this may not meet instance rules, or whatever, but like, holy fuck, the amount of shit you can just lie about, without people asking question, kneecaps should've happened years ago, what the fuck are we doing bro.
Coming from the other direction - when someone ackshullys a parson, but the person was using the phrase correctly.
I had to explain to someone online today that "liminal space" had multiple meanings, and it didn't only refer to spaces you transition through, and the spooky "liminal space aesthetic" is a valid and coherent use of the word "liminal" and the term "liminal space"
"The proof is in the pudding."
The actual phrase is: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating."
It means that your dessert might look and smell delicious, but if you fucked up the recipe, say by using salt instead of sugar, then it will taste bad. You won't know for sure until you eat it. So, a plan might look good on paper but be a disaster when implemented.
"The proof is in the pudding" doesn't mean anything.
I feel that this one is slightly pedantic because, strictly speaking, "the proof is in the pudding" is also technically correct. After all, the proof of the pudding is in the pudding. Yes, the more correct form is much more clear as to what it means, but that doesn't invalidate the mis-phrasing.
So weird, I just heard this phrase in its entirety from Dr. Smith, of the classic Lost in Space series.
It's such a goofy show but the dialogue can be shockingly eloquent.
"Proof is in the pudding" always got to me too... Thought it was some old weird Baker-farmer-ism or something Lol.
Unless you bake some incriminating evidence into it.
