Comments on: “Peeved”

by: Doug

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 15:59:30 +0000

I suffer the same peeve…Only one thing exceeds my hatred of overused quotations, and that is the apostrophe S. Just because it ends in S, it doesn’t need an apostrophe…Drives me crazy.

But, as you can see I have an unhealthy attachment to the ellipsis…I guess everyone has their “thing.”

by: Juliet

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 01:02:22 +0000

Actually I’m wrong - Borge had a routine in which all the punctuation marks were indicated by sounds. This memory dates from the days when my parents listened to his recordings on a wind-up gramophone!

by: Juliet

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:08:12 +0000

I think comedian Victor Borge may have been the first person to use wiggly fingers to indicate something in quotes - back then, it was genuinely funny!

by: Carina Araujo

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:10:40 +0000

I’m always annoyed if I see someone using way too many commas in a single phrase. It irritates me even more than the quotation marks! Of course, this only happens with amateurs. But since I tutor a couple of kids, I have to read their comma-filled texts. LOL

Hilarious post!

by: theamcginnis

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:07:19 +0000

well, kathleen, ‘to thine own self be true’…i mean, i would never consciously take ownership of other people’s original thoughts. but i have used quotes before, and will probably use them again, to emphasize sarcastically, my opinion, of some other person’s idiocy or pomposity. and i’m ’sure’ others have air quoted me as well!!!!!!!!!!

by: astrothsknot

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:57:17 +0000

Bunny quotes are used because the world needs more bunnies. Even fake ones.

by: Cath

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:05:24 +0000

Biggest pet peeve ever? “For you and I.” Everytime I hear someone use the pronoun “I” as the object of that prepositional phrase because they think it “sounds right” I want to scream.

But I don’t have a problem with quotation marks. Obviously. (Very funny link. Thanks!)

by: Anthony S. Policastro

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:04:29 +0000

Hi Kathleen,
One of my peeves is with names. Check out this photo of a company name that I think is rather ridiculous from my photo blog, Moments in Phontography at http://momentsview.blogspot.com/2007/09/whats-in-name.html

by: Kathleen Bolton

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:19:47 +0000

(You’ll note above I used a slash between blogging/web — I’m sure that’s someone else’s peeve. Along with parenthesis and hyphen I just used.)

LOL, Eric! (Oh god, more peeves unleashed).

by: Eric

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:09:25 +0000

I’m guilty of the quotes thing. The only reason I do it is to emphasize sarcasm, because it’s impossible to convey sarcasm & cynicism in everyday text.

Example: Kathleen thinks that excessive quotes reduce the ‘quality’ of text.

Here I’m poking fun at the definition of quality in blogging/web writing. If I said it out loud, there would have been a snarky emphasis on ‘quality.’ I suppose you could use italics or find some other way to emphasize.

(You’ll note above I used a slash between blogging/web — I’m sure that’s someone else’s peeve. Along with parenthesis and hyphen I just used.)

I know another peeve some people have is the use of actual quotations of famous people and such. The argument is that they’re so ubiquitous as to be meaningless.

Clearly people place value in them otherwise they wouldn’t use them? Yeah it’s a bit tired, but what isn’t? Maybe we should ban the entire English language for peevish overuse.

I don’t really have any peeves in style of writing or what devices people use. If I had to pick some peeves, I’d say it’s just the general not capitalizing sentences or using punctuation, not spelling things correctly.

Can you write without excessive use of parenthesis, hyphens, use of two words simultaneously divided by a slash, etc.? Sure. Especially for something official like a published document or a book.

But in a casual sense these anachronisms make up part of a writer’s style, and for web writing it probably doesn’t matter all that much.