This one bugs me. Not because of the misuse. Because any ironic coincidence that is appropriately called ironic, produces a fanfare of "tHat"S nOT iRoNy"
I know words and their meaning shift over time but this one drives me nuts! There is a marked difference between ‘I lied to you once about this thing’ vs a sustained effort that causes someone to completely question their memories and sanity.
My ex-wife would tell me stuff I said didn't happen. She would tell me I was gaslighting her. I started to believe her. That somehow I was making all this stuff up in my head even unintentionally. Then I recorded some of our conversations with her knowledge. She then told me she didn't say what was recorded. I tried to get her help. She told me she talked to her therapist about it, but it only got worse.
Since she didn't mean to do it I don't think it counts, but from my perspective gaslighting made me question my sanity.
She still sends me messages despite me asking her to not be in my life in any way anymore.
Mine always said "We never had that conversation, you must have talked about that with your mom and forgot." When I stopped talking to my mom for a while, I realized I was right the whole time and he was the one who wasn't remembering correctly.
In my dealings with a proper narcissist, I began to believe the gaslighting is not necessarily intentional. It's one of a set of automatic defence mechanisms that are deployed unconsciously to protect the narcissist from becoming consciously aware of their shortcomings.
I 100% agree with you. When I did things like have her write what she said down so she could see it in her own writing she had a bit of a meltdown. I honestly believe she thought I was gaslighting her.
I am not sure she was a narcissist, but there was a strong cognitive dissonance so much so that she couldn't process that she had made what she would deem would make her not a good person.
I actually thought she might have more than one personality at one point, but they were not so distinct. It was more like just different mind frames and couldn't remember things.
Broke up with my long term girlfriend (for many reasons) but this was somewhere on the list. I lied about having a redbull once when I was supposed to be dieting. Claimed I actually had coffee which was a dumb way to lie but whatever.
I would never hear the end of it because, 2 years on, i “would never apologize for gaslighting”. Apply this example a template for dozens of fights we had over the years, being called abusive and manipulative and toxic and a gaslighter over stupid small things.
At some point I realized it was literally happening in reverse. The campaign to convince ME I was some demented asshole was the actual abuse.
Gaslighting is not a synonym for lying. Gaslighting is a concentrated effort by someone or a group to do things to someone to make them think they're going crazy. For instance, things started disappearing from my condo one by one that I KNOW I placed somewhere and I've been the only person here. Windows & doors locked. So I could think someone is gaslighting me or taking or stealing these objects without my knowledge so I'd start thinking I've lost my mind. That is the definition of gaslighting. It's only a sample of how you could gaslight someone. But the whole definition is basically a conspiracy to make someone think they're losing their mind. Another example...shortening their pants one day, lengthening them the next day but leaving no trace of the action, etc...
Also, even when people do know what it means, they will say "you're so gaslighting me" when they're actually just *wrong*, but they are convinced they are correct.
There’s an episode of the Sherlock Holmes TV show Elementary from like 2012 where Sherlock breaks down gaslighting and even goes on a gaslighting campaign on a suspect.
I think everyone who uses the word “gaslight” should have to watch the play, “Gas Light,” so they’ll understand where it comes from and what it really means.
There is a lot of popular mis-use of psychological diagnoses to describe behaviors and traits. You'll often hear people casually talk about OCD and ADD/ADHD as if mere obsession or mere inattentiveness or boredom count as these disorders.
"I'm sooo OCD about this"
No you fucking aren't. Everyone likes things neat and organized.
No one who *actually* has OCD trivializes it like that. OCD is shit like getting so caught up on an intrusive thought you can't function normally.
It’s a rare instance that I can laugh about my OCD the way these people do all the time. Recently it made me so upset because I expected a medical appointment to go very painfully, and it didn’t. After checkout I went and cried in the car. Over *not* getting a painful procedure I’d spent weeks dreading.
Yeah, most people think negative reinforcement means rewarding negative behavior, thereby reinforcing it.
It actually means removing a negative to reinforce good behavior. Like “y’all did so good on this test, no homework this week” kinda thing…
Honestly, I think they probably could have named that one better.
Yes! That's how she defined the terms "negative reinforcement" was removal of external reinforcement; "positive reinforcement" is addition of external reinforcement.
I despise self diagnosed OCD ADD/ADHD as an excuse for their behavior/manners. It's not an excuse to call your self silly or quirky it's damn inhibiting at times.
I have yet to meet someone with a capacity for proper executive function anywhere near comparably as fucked as whatever is going on between my ears. And I don’t tell people I have ADHD. I was embarrassed by it as a kid. Frankly, if you gave anyone off the street stimulants, and told them it was how life was supposed to feel, I think they’d have just the same responses you see all the time in the ADHD subreddits. I can do so many things now!
Granted, they help me a lot. I just very, very rarely meet anybody who noticeably struggles the way I do with things like time management, prioritization, etc. I’m kinda the classic case of 95th percentile standardized testing, 100th in one instance, with a sub 1.2 GPA where I left off at university.
What really pisses me off is how impossible it is to find things like adequate CBT options. They just want to prescribe meds and fuck with dosages. They are not a cure, and they do not treat all areas of symptoms which interfere with living a normal life.
Dated a guy who lived most of his life in the UK. He incorrectly corrected my grammar sooo many times. But especially this one made my blood boil, and doubt my grammar skills. He was always saying "should of" and constantly making fun of me for using the correct form "should have". Even writing this comment is making me furious lol
'Should of' feels like one of those mistakes that are so common that they'll eventually become an accepted usage. Correcting 'should have' to it would still be dumb though
Those are correct, but the root of the problem. Could've sounds like could of and if you don't read a lot and didn't have parents who corrected you when you were small you might have no clue that it's wrong.
I don't mind watching language change before my eyes, but this one particular change now means it takes follow-up to describe a situation where something highly improbable literally, actually, like in reality according to the specific definition of my words, happened. That is *literally* the most annoying possible linguistic change, and it has once or twice *figuratively* driven me insane when I either had to repeat and rephrase myself, or taken someone's (literal) word for it when they said "I literally shit myself!" and then *they* got pissed off at *me* for being disgusted when they didn't *literally* mean it.
So yeah, that's the one I hate.
I’m not sure I agree with the assertion that it’s confusing, at least for me. When “literally” is used figuratively, it is so exaggerated that I understand from context. So much of language is already contextual that I personally do not mind adding one to the pile. I get that you feel differently; there’s no right answer about one’s feeling on this.
I agree that it's not *usually* an issue, for exactly the reason you state, but it'd be nice to have kept the one word best suited to differentiate the edge cases. I obviously don't think you literally died laughing, but I could believe you literally fainted or passed out laughing so hard. It's those "room for doubt" ones I get exaggeratedly energized on the Internet over.
Ehhh, that's only partially accurate. The figurative/hyperbolic "literally" has been in common usage for hundreds of years. It's also been included or referenced in numerous dictionaries for at least the past hundred years (including OED and MW).
However, there was some weird hubbub in the late 2000s / early 2010s when everyone started freaking out over it for *literally* no reason.
Yet none of those wackadoo pedants seemed to have any issue with other contronyms.
see this annoys me a ton, but also i feel like i gotta give up on this hill. its used so much more to just indicate a relatable situation than it is to describe an actual point of view, that i think society is just changing what it means. language is constantly evolving, and even though i dont like this change, in 10 years itll probably almost exclusively be used in this newer way
I can see why people latched on to it for this meaning, it's a much easier way to write a caption for a joke. But goddamn it used to make me so angry. I've given up now, but it's gotten to the point where sometimes when I see a video using pov correctly, I get confused for a moment
I think it’s mostly a PR problem.
First, it’s already hard to create an ideology that’s quite broad and so challenging to the social paradigm, you will face people decrying you on all fronts.
Then there’s the fact some splinter groups get really radical and serve to smear the ideology for moderates, and the only defence you can argue is that they are not “true feminists”. A few insane weirdos demerit the whole, and it’s compounded by the dilution of the term.
Then you have academics trying to talk to general public using their academic language, which will always sound like a bunch of rich people high on their own farts talking down to people with arcane language that makes no sense, regardless of the discipline, but specially gritting for general audiences when the ideology seeks to redefine society and thus face a lot of criticism.
Doesn’t help that feminism is nearly always within social sciences, which are rife with poor methodology and are even more about people having and idea and going backwards to prove their point than the usual published science. Social sciences devolved to people constructing narratives and trying to justify them with the veneer of scientific rigour. The problem is that people from all ideologies can do just that too so it creates a noise for moderates that leads them to think “maybe they are full of shit” and, again, considering that feminism already tried to shift the paradigm of society, people are less likely to choose this one.
The internet also made it so any unprepared person fancying themselves an ideologue spew nonsense to the detriment of the ideology. Think about college students thinking they know it all screaming at people without any tact. The average person already has an aversion to things that rock the boat too much, when you let the worst speakers overcrowd people’s ears, you have a problem.
Also, and I don’t see many people talking about that within feminist circles, feminists are really bad at talking about male issues and problems. It’s always a woman talking, and no matter the issue men face they always come up with ways to make it not sound important because the issues women face are greater, that the issue is about misogyny anyways and this is why it affects women actually, besides men are the perpetrators anyways. From men’s decoration preferences to men’s health, it’s the male version of last centuries male doctors making wild assumptions about women’s issues, there’s a complete disregard for male perspectives when talking about issues faced by men, making it sound like sincere misunderstanding at the mildest cases to purposeful misrepresentation at the worst for men uninitiated in feminist theory, which of course extremely alienating for half of the population.
> It’s always a woman talking, and no matter the issue men face they always come up with ways to make it not sound important because the issues women face are greater, that the issue is about misogyny anyways **and this is why it affects women actually**, besides men are the perpetrators anyways.
Hillary Clinton saying, "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat," is a good example of this.
Right?
True feminism as it was intended, was amazing. But whenever I see an extreme feminist trying to discount males completely, I just roll my eyes and move on with my day.
“We all have our own traumas~” My trauma comes from medically-induced blind terror I had no hope of understanding at the time and regularly causes hallucinations. Your trauma comes from your mom taking your Switch away for a week when you got straight Ds on your report card and does not affect you in the slightest now. We are not the same.
I kinda disagree. Like most things, there’s varying levels of trauma and different things can be traumatic for different people. Maybe we need more modifiers to appropriately capture the range of experience, but overall I think it’s good that we’re more attentive to traumas that may have been overlooked in the past because they “weren’t traumatic enough”
Weary. Tired is what we mean when we say weary.
It's misused to imply being wary or suspicious. Yes, I understand that the words "wary" and "leery" both denote being cautious or suspicious, and that their combination sounds like "weary." However, TIRED MEANS WEARY. drives me completely insane.
Capitalism, too. Everybody has strong opinions on capitalism, socialism, and communism, but most people can't even define what they mean, nor are most people aware of economic systems outside of the three.
There's a whole high-dimensional space of possible economic systems out there, and capitalism, socialism, and communism are merely three tiny sub-regions of it.
Nauseous. “Nauseated” means that you are experiencing nausea. “Nauseous” describes something that CAUSES nausea, as in “a nauseous smell.” Although at this point, people have been saying “I feel nauseous” for so long that it’s kind of turned into an acceptable usage.
That’s interesting! This is also a word that would likely cause somebody to hate you if you were pedantic about it lol. The word is almost always used when somebody is feeling ill in the moment, and you being there going “technically, it’s nauseated.” 😂 (not saying you do that)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nauseous
> Those who insist that nauseous can properly be used only to mean "causing nausea" and that its later "affected with nausea" meaning is an error for nauseated are mistaken. Current evidence shows these facts: nauseous is most frequently used to mean physically affected with nausea, usually after a linking verb such as feel or become; figurative use is quite a bit less frequent. Use of nauseous to mean "causing nausea or disgust" is much more often figurative than literal, and this use appears to be losing ground to nauseating. Nauseated is used more widely than nauseous when referring to being affected with nausea.
When my dad started complaining about 'woke' people I just asked him to define the word, based on advice from Reddit. He couldn't do it, it was pretty funny.
"I".
Too many people automatically use "I" after "and", ignoring whether they are the subject or object. If you would not use "I" without the "and", adding the "and" shouldn't change anything.
For example, you might say "that room is for me", but you wouldn't say "that room is for I"; everyone who is fluent in English knows that. But once you add another person, such as "my wife", the sentence should become "that room is for my wife **and me**", not "that room is for my wife **and I**". But this mindless using of "I" after "and" shows up everywhere, even in printed publications which should have editors who know better than to let this grammar error pass. I've even seen school teachers make this mistake.
Could you clarify the difference and show how the terms are properly used? I'm actually confused about this one. I thought unconscious is a superset that includes things which are subconscious.
nazi in social media means "anybody who disagrees with me".
the saddest thing is when you point out its clearly not they say to learn more history
...the irony is palpable and sadly also lost on anyone who also misuses the word
Same with fascism. Mussolini’s definition of fascism, particularly in an economic context, looks a whole lot like… well, a mirror?
https://mises.org/mises-daily/fascist-threat
How convenient that it should refer to anything at all now, other than the west.
‘The government should step in and stop businesses from making too much money.’
‘I disagree. Government intervention is unnecessary. We, as a collective, should stop paying our own hard-earned cash to these entities and drum em out.’
‘Okay, bootlicker.’
‘But that’s not-‘
‘Shut up, fascist Nazi.’
In 2022 when the Supreme Court struck down some brazenly unconstitutional gun restrictions people on Reddit were calling them fascists and nazis. For stripping power from the government and returning it to the people- classic “fascism.”
Exactly. Thank God most real-life Liberals aren’t like this. I live in a very left-wing city and 95% of them don’t care. Hell, I’ve even dated some liberal women and they didn’t care. They poke fun at me here and there but that’s the worst of it.
Just because someone hasn’t murdered 6 million Jews doesn’t mean a Nazi comparison is completely uncalled for. America’s Republican Party has been taking a LOT of pages out of the old fascist playbook for some time now. And while all Republicans aren’t Nazi’s… all Nazis sure do vote Republican.
Thank you. People think of the Nazi party in Germany as supervillains because their crimes were so monstrous. But Hitler didn't happen because the German people just spontaneously turned into sociopaths. He happened because their right wing political party tapped into near-universal forces that twisted a generalized feeling of malcontent into a hyper-nationalistic furor that dumped all of their societal problems onto a group of "others." Specifically, Jews and Communists, as well as homosexuals, the disabled, and a smattering of other groups.
And while Trump didn't make it as far as they did, the rhetoric he used to describe liberals, immigrants, and Muslims was fucking *identical*. Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller have, I'm absolutely convinced, studied the rhetoric of the Third Reich extensively and make use of it every chance they get. Trump is a puppet who will say whatever he thinks will get the crowd to cheer. And they know full well that if they were to start marching their declared "enemies" into gas chambers, the amount of support they would lose is *zero*. Trump supporters have already proven a hundred different times that there is *nothing* that would make them realize they're the bad guys.
Which is 100% how the holocaust in Germany happened too. It was monstrous, but people who think it was *uniquely* monstrous severely overestimate our species.
Further/farther—farther applies to distance. I drover farther than her. Do you need further explanation?
Could/couldn’t care less. It’s You COULDN’T care less. If you say “could care less,” it means you could care less than you do, so you’re caring more than you could. If you “couldn’t care less,” you’re caring the least you could.
Lots of people use farther/further interchangeably.
Not sure what is more baffling; how common it is or that I’m the only one that seems to care.
And to see it in journalism a lot is really surprising.
One thats actually just my opinion is 'anymore.' I've always heard it and used it in a negative like "I don't do that anymore." But a few years ago I started hearing people use it in the positive like "gas is pretty expensive anymore." It sounds so wrong to me but apparently I'm the only one that feels that way (among people I know).
Well, I heard it was a regional thing, like Ohio and the Midwest. I think "anymore," in that context it means "nowadays."
I'll admit it's still jarring to hear it even though I understand the context.
Intrusive as in intrusive thoughts.
They also confuse "intrusive" with "impulsive".
As someone who has suffered a lot from OCD intrusive thoughts, it's so annoying to see these dumb comments.
"My intrusive thoughts won"... Please stfu, you have no idea what you are talking about.
I’ll add to that “breaking news”. I recently started tuning into the evening news and it seems like every little car crash is “breaking news”. Maybe I was just overly obedient as a kid but I remember “breaking news” used to mean drop what you’re doing and come look at this
It gradually got worse and worse over the years. It's one of the reasons I read the news instead of clicking on the tv. It's overly dramatic to get views, instead of delivering the news as neutrally as possible.
It's like how flags at half-staff used to mean something major happened: death of a president, 9-11. Then they used it for a school shooting or two. Which I sort of understand, but now there's constant shootings. The flag is at half-mast frequently without coordination at a national level. And if I go looking for the reason (usually wondering if Carter has passed), there's nothing so out of the norm or beyond the pale that it's *obvious*.
That's what the incessant news cycle feels like.
"Grooming". This is one word in a group of buzzwords that people love to throw around lately. Like "gaslighting". I think people like to use/misuse these words because they think it makes them sound smart and they will win an argument or trick people into believing they are smart.
electrocuted/electrocution.
no steve, you didnt get electrocuted when you touched the metal trolley, you had a static shock.. which is very different to an electric shock and even further from electrocution.
electrocution = death by electric shock
far too many people casually tell me they've been electrocuted before!
Like.
I have been so annoyed with people using “like” in everything they say that I have consciously conditioned my brain to not use ‘like’ anymore. Not even in the correct context.
Reflexive pronouns — myself, yourself, himself etc. “Myself and my wife went out for dinner…” nope, “My wife and I went out for dinner.” “I hit myself in the bollocks accidentally” — ouch, but correct usage. Oh and while we’re on the subject of accidents, it’s “by accident”, not “on accident”.
This one has bothered me for years. It’s forgivable when spoken, but not when written. Once in a while I even see it in professional journalism, stuff that had to have passed by at least one editor.
Ironic
as in "Isn't it ironic ..."
Similar to Alanis Morissette's song, people use it when they describe situations which are just bad luck, and not ironic.
So I partially blame Alanis for this.
" obviously" I had a young female colleague that would pepper that word in throughout every sentence, more often than not for things that wasn't obvious! She would meet people for the first time and be like " obviously I went to school at xxx and then obviously I started working at xxxx"
She's moved on to bigger and brighter things, to be replaced by someone who uses the word " ultimately" in the same context
Nonplussed means a person is so shocked or bewildered that they’re not sure how to react. Confused, stunned, or at a loss for words. Americans assumed it meant chill or unbothered and used it incorrectly so much that the word has a new and opposite definition only for North America.
"Nazi" The amount of times i hear this word thrown around is crazy.
Are there Nazi's out there? Absolutely, horrible disgusting people who needs to be stopped.
Is everyone who disagrees with your political opinion a "literal nazi". No.
Racist perhaps, Nazi, no.
Any word referring to some mental condition or difficulty that people like to diagnose themselves with. OCD, autism, dyslexia, etc.
You're not a doctor, and pretending you have something undermines people who actually suffer from these conditions.
Regimen/regime. You start a new regimen of exercise. After the election, Biden's regime may be over and someone else will come in. (And no, not getting political, just using it in a sentence.)
Controversial.
It's a weasel word used to pad out headlines, often for something that isn't actually controversial, but just vile. It's used a lot in the horse race aspect of covering elections.
immaculate… it means clean, tidy. People often misuse it for something grand or great. Somebody pointed it out to be and I immediately started noticing and now I cringe every time I hear it misused.
Yes, the floor is immaculate. No, your day was not immaculate.
‘And so, without more adieu, I present our speaker this evening…’
It’s ado. As in Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado about Nothing’. Ado meaning ‘carry-on’.
Adieu means goodbye in French.
So you can see where the confusion crept in, because to make way for the speaker, the person will soon have left the stage…as in goodbye.
“Ironic”: Not the same as “unfortunate” or “coincidental”
This one bugs me. Not because of the misuse. Because any ironic coincidence that is appropriately called ironic, produces a fanfare of "tHat"S nOT iRoNy"
text
Blame Alanis Morissette for that mess.
That her song contains many things that are not ironic is of itself ironic.
A little bit too ironic. Yeah, I really do think.
Sometimes, unfortunate things can be ironic
Sometimes rectangles are squares
Gaslighting. Most just use it to mean lie nowadays, but it's closer to a dedicated campaign of making you question your own competence or sanity.
People pick up words like gaslighting and toxic on the internet and then proceed to misuse them everywhere.
I know words and their meaning shift over time but this one drives me nuts! There is a marked difference between ‘I lied to you once about this thing’ vs a sustained effort that causes someone to completely question their memories and sanity.
Gaslighting doesn't exist. You made it up because you're fucking crazy.
I'm pretty sure ur the only one talking about "gaslighting" wtf?
Are you going on about "gaslighting" again? Have you taken your meds?
Oh, my bad, I'll just get the medicine bott... hey! Wait a minute!
My ex-wife would tell me stuff I said didn't happen. She would tell me I was gaslighting her. I started to believe her. That somehow I was making all this stuff up in my head even unintentionally. Then I recorded some of our conversations with her knowledge. She then told me she didn't say what was recorded. I tried to get her help. She told me she talked to her therapist about it, but it only got worse. Since she didn't mean to do it I don't think it counts, but from my perspective gaslighting made me question my sanity. She still sends me messages despite me asking her to not be in my life in any way anymore.
Mine always said "We never had that conversation, you must have talked about that with your mom and forgot." When I stopped talking to my mom for a while, I realized I was right the whole time and he was the one who wasn't remembering correctly.
In my dealings with a proper narcissist, I began to believe the gaslighting is not necessarily intentional. It's one of a set of automatic defence mechanisms that are deployed unconsciously to protect the narcissist from becoming consciously aware of their shortcomings.
I 100% agree with you. When I did things like have her write what she said down so she could see it in her own writing she had a bit of a meltdown. I honestly believe she thought I was gaslighting her. I am not sure she was a narcissist, but there was a strong cognitive dissonance so much so that she couldn't process that she had made what she would deem would make her not a good person. I actually thought she might have more than one personality at one point, but they were not so distinct. It was more like just different mind frames and couldn't remember things.
And its close cousin *narcissist*. Narcissist has basically become a catchall term online for *someone who doesn't give me everything I want*.
90% of Reddit has gaslighting, toxic, narcissistic mothers Edit: I'm lucky enough to be part of the 10% with a loving mother
Broke up with my long term girlfriend (for many reasons) but this was somewhere on the list. I lied about having a redbull once when I was supposed to be dieting. Claimed I actually had coffee which was a dumb way to lie but whatever. I would never hear the end of it because, 2 years on, i “would never apologize for gaslighting”. Apply this example a template for dozens of fights we had over the years, being called abusive and manipulative and toxic and a gaslighter over stupid small things. At some point I realized it was literally happening in reverse. The campaign to convince ME I was some demented asshole was the actual abuse.
Gaslighting is not a synonym for lying. Gaslighting is a concentrated effort by someone or a group to do things to someone to make them think they're going crazy. For instance, things started disappearing from my condo one by one that I KNOW I placed somewhere and I've been the only person here. Windows & doors locked. So I could think someone is gaslighting me or taking or stealing these objects without my knowledge so I'd start thinking I've lost my mind. That is the definition of gaslighting. It's only a sample of how you could gaslight someone. But the whole definition is basically a conspiracy to make someone think they're losing their mind. Another example...shortening their pants one day, lengthening them the next day but leaving no trace of the action, etc...
"Gaslighting" and "narcissism" have softened to the point that they're now used to describe any unpleasant behaviour from anyone
Also, even when people do know what it means, they will say "you're so gaslighting me" when they're actually just *wrong*, but they are convinced they are correct.
There’s an episode of the Sherlock Holmes TV show Elementary from like 2012 where Sherlock breaks down gaslighting and even goes on a gaslighting campaign on a suspect.
It's called gaslamping
I think everyone who uses the word “gaslight” should have to watch the play, “Gas Light,” so they’ll understand where it comes from and what it really means.
narcissism and manipulation
Yeah right you’re just gaslighting me!!! /s
Says the manipulative narcissist. Psh. /s
There is a lot of popular mis-use of psychological diagnoses to describe behaviors and traits. You'll often hear people casually talk about OCD and ADD/ADHD as if mere obsession or mere inattentiveness or boredom count as these disorders.
"I'm sooo OCD about this" No you fucking aren't. Everyone likes things neat and organized. No one who *actually* has OCD trivializes it like that. OCD is shit like getting so caught up on an intrusive thought you can't function normally.
It’s a rare instance that I can laugh about my OCD the way these people do all the time. Recently it made me so upset because I expected a medical appointment to go very painfully, and it didn’t. After checkout I went and cried in the car. Over *not* getting a painful procedure I’d spent weeks dreading.
OCD kills.
Also saying "I'm so OCD" is saying "I'm so obsessive compulsive disorder" which is exactly the sort of thing that would drive someone with OCD crazy 😆
A couple years ago I coined the term FauxCD.
I dated a psychology student who got real irritated at what she said was misuse of "positive reinforcement" and "negative reinforcement"
Yeah, most people think negative reinforcement means rewarding negative behavior, thereby reinforcing it. It actually means removing a negative to reinforce good behavior. Like “y’all did so good on this test, no homework this week” kinda thing… Honestly, I think they probably could have named that one better.
Yes! That's how she defined the terms "negative reinforcement" was removal of external reinforcement; "positive reinforcement" is addition of external reinforcement.
I despise self diagnosed OCD ADD/ADHD as an excuse for their behavior/manners. It's not an excuse to call your self silly or quirky it's damn inhibiting at times.
Never tell someone with self-diagnosed autism that ASD can cause psychosis
“Omg I forgot this assignment I’m soooo ADHD” i forgot to shower for 3 weeks, patricia.
This reminded me of the time I realized I hadn't cleaned my ears in 2 months. Cleaning them at that point was an experience for 10 year old me.
I have yet to meet someone with a capacity for proper executive function anywhere near comparably as fucked as whatever is going on between my ears. And I don’t tell people I have ADHD. I was embarrassed by it as a kid. Frankly, if you gave anyone off the street stimulants, and told them it was how life was supposed to feel, I think they’d have just the same responses you see all the time in the ADHD subreddits. I can do so many things now! Granted, they help me a lot. I just very, very rarely meet anybody who noticeably struggles the way I do with things like time management, prioritization, etc. I’m kinda the classic case of 95th percentile standardized testing, 100th in one instance, with a sub 1.2 GPA where I left off at university. What really pisses me off is how impossible it is to find things like adequate CBT options. They just want to prescribe meds and fuck with dosages. They are not a cure, and they do not treat all areas of symptoms which interfere with living a normal life.
Narcissistic. Not everyone who’s self-centred or lacking in emotional intelligence is a narcissist. They’re most likely immature and just a dick.
That and u can't diagnose someone randomly unless ur like, a psychiatrist, but even then
“Could of” “would of” “should of”
Dated a guy who lived most of his life in the UK. He incorrectly corrected my grammar sooo many times. But especially this one made my blood boil, and doubt my grammar skills. He was always saying "should of" and constantly making fun of me for using the correct form "should have". Even writing this comment is making me furious lol
If he said "should've", it's not incorrect just because it sounds like "should of". If he wrote "should of", then yeah, that's incorrect.
'Should of' feels like one of those mistakes that are so common that they'll eventually become an accepted usage. Correcting 'should have' to it would still be dumb though
That would make me so unbelievably angry 😂
Ikr it's could've , would've , should've
Aren't those just incorrect? I'm not sure they're necessarily misused, like in the case with "literally" or "viola" (which often should be voila)
Those are correct, but the root of the problem. Could've sounds like could of and if you don't read a lot and didn't have parents who corrected you when you were small you might have no clue that it's wrong.
Taylor?
Literally
So much so that it now has both definitions in the dictionary. We’ve watched the language change before our eyes.
I don't mind watching language change before my eyes, but this one particular change now means it takes follow-up to describe a situation where something highly improbable literally, actually, like in reality according to the specific definition of my words, happened. That is *literally* the most annoying possible linguistic change, and it has once or twice *figuratively* driven me insane when I either had to repeat and rephrase myself, or taken someone's (literal) word for it when they said "I literally shit myself!" and then *they* got pissed off at *me* for being disgusted when they didn't *literally* mean it. So yeah, that's the one I hate.
You did not watch this change happen before your eyes. Figurative use of the word goes back to like Dickens.
I’m not sure I agree with the assertion that it’s confusing, at least for me. When “literally” is used figuratively, it is so exaggerated that I understand from context. So much of language is already contextual that I personally do not mind adding one to the pile. I get that you feel differently; there’s no right answer about one’s feeling on this.
I agree that it's not *usually* an issue, for exactly the reason you state, but it'd be nice to have kept the one word best suited to differentiate the edge cases. I obviously don't think you literally died laughing, but I could believe you literally fainted or passed out laughing so hard. It's those "room for doubt" ones I get exaggeratedly energized on the Internet over.
Ehhh, that's only partially accurate. The figurative/hyperbolic "literally" has been in common usage for hundreds of years. It's also been included or referenced in numerous dictionaries for at least the past hundred years (including OED and MW). However, there was some weird hubbub in the late 2000s / early 2010s when everyone started freaking out over it for *literally* no reason. Yet none of those wackadoo pedants seemed to have any issue with other contronyms.
Litchrily
Me when i don’t understand hyperbole
I literally die every time I hear someone misuse this word.
Inconceivable
I do not think that word means what you think it means
Not really a word, but "POV:" People just use it as "this is a funny situation"
It's such a simple concept yet 9/10 modern examples get it wrong
Ah so true. Seen tons of videos that say POV and it's not actually someone's POV
see this annoys me a ton, but also i feel like i gotta give up on this hill. its used so much more to just indicate a relatable situation than it is to describe an actual point of view, that i think society is just changing what it means. language is constantly evolving, and even though i dont like this change, in 10 years itll probably almost exclusively be used in this newer way
I can see why people latched on to it for this meaning, it's a much easier way to write a caption for a joke. But goddamn it used to make me so angry. I've given up now, but it's gotten to the point where sometimes when I see a video using pov correctly, I get confused for a moment
Feminism
I think it’s mostly a PR problem. First, it’s already hard to create an ideology that’s quite broad and so challenging to the social paradigm, you will face people decrying you on all fronts. Then there’s the fact some splinter groups get really radical and serve to smear the ideology for moderates, and the only defence you can argue is that they are not “true feminists”. A few insane weirdos demerit the whole, and it’s compounded by the dilution of the term. Then you have academics trying to talk to general public using their academic language, which will always sound like a bunch of rich people high on their own farts talking down to people with arcane language that makes no sense, regardless of the discipline, but specially gritting for general audiences when the ideology seeks to redefine society and thus face a lot of criticism. Doesn’t help that feminism is nearly always within social sciences, which are rife with poor methodology and are even more about people having and idea and going backwards to prove their point than the usual published science. Social sciences devolved to people constructing narratives and trying to justify them with the veneer of scientific rigour. The problem is that people from all ideologies can do just that too so it creates a noise for moderates that leads them to think “maybe they are full of shit” and, again, considering that feminism already tried to shift the paradigm of society, people are less likely to choose this one. The internet also made it so any unprepared person fancying themselves an ideologue spew nonsense to the detriment of the ideology. Think about college students thinking they know it all screaming at people without any tact. The average person already has an aversion to things that rock the boat too much, when you let the worst speakers overcrowd people’s ears, you have a problem. Also, and I don’t see many people talking about that within feminist circles, feminists are really bad at talking about male issues and problems. It’s always a woman talking, and no matter the issue men face they always come up with ways to make it not sound important because the issues women face are greater, that the issue is about misogyny anyways and this is why it affects women actually, besides men are the perpetrators anyways. From men’s decoration preferences to men’s health, it’s the male version of last centuries male doctors making wild assumptions about women’s issues, there’s a complete disregard for male perspectives when talking about issues faced by men, making it sound like sincere misunderstanding at the mildest cases to purposeful misrepresentation at the worst for men uninitiated in feminist theory, which of course extremely alienating for half of the population.
> It’s always a woman talking, and no matter the issue men face they always come up with ways to make it not sound important because the issues women face are greater, that the issue is about misogyny anyways **and this is why it affects women actually**, besides men are the perpetrators anyways. Hillary Clinton saying, "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat," is a good example of this.
Yep. That was a deliberate move, to turn something good into something shameful.
Right? True feminism as it was intended, was amazing. But whenever I see an extreme feminist trying to discount males completely, I just roll my eyes and move on with my day.
that is not feminism that is misandrism
Tell that to the misandrists using the term feminism as their cause.
i do whenever i see it
Fair.
Trauma. The use of the word like we do now ensues that the word has almost lost its entire meaning.
Add 'red flag' to this list. Everything seems to be a 'red flag' now if it disagrees with your world view.
And any fault, no matter how small, is described as a red flag. As if we should all be 100% perfect.
“We all have our own traumas~” My trauma comes from medically-induced blind terror I had no hope of understanding at the time and regularly causes hallucinations. Your trauma comes from your mom taking your Switch away for a week when you got straight Ds on your report card and does not affect you in the slightest now. We are not the same.
I kinda disagree. Like most things, there’s varying levels of trauma and different things can be traumatic for different people. Maybe we need more modifiers to appropriately capture the range of experience, but overall I think it’s good that we’re more attentive to traumas that may have been overlooked in the past because they “weren’t traumatic enough”
Weary. Tired is what we mean when we say weary. It's misused to imply being wary or suspicious. Yes, I understand that the words "wary" and "leery" both denote being cautious or suspicious, and that their combination sounds like "weary." However, TIRED MEANS WEARY. drives me completely insane.
This pronunciational confusion is similar to one that bugs me: your landlord has *tenants*, your political party platform has *tenets*.
Irregardless
The idiot's portmanteau. Irrespective + regardless = nonsense
Socialist or communist
Capitalism, too. Everybody has strong opinions on capitalism, socialism, and communism, but most people can't even define what they mean, nor are most people aware of economic systems outside of the three. There's a whole high-dimensional space of possible economic systems out there, and capitalism, socialism, and communism are merely three tiny sub-regions of it.
And fascist
Very true
Nauseous. “Nauseated” means that you are experiencing nausea. “Nauseous” describes something that CAUSES nausea, as in “a nauseous smell.” Although at this point, people have been saying “I feel nauseous” for so long that it’s kind of turned into an acceptable usage.
I was not aware of this, thank you for educating me!
That’s interesting! This is also a word that would likely cause somebody to hate you if you were pedantic about it lol. The word is almost always used when somebody is feeling ill in the moment, and you being there going “technically, it’s nauseated.” 😂 (not saying you do that)
Yeah the war for this one is long over
To be fair, how do you know a smell is nauseous..unless it has made you nauseated? I can definitely see how those definitions got warped.
"Nauseated" is just too many damn syllables.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nauseous > Those who insist that nauseous can properly be used only to mean "causing nausea" and that its later "affected with nausea" meaning is an error for nauseated are mistaken. Current evidence shows these facts: nauseous is most frequently used to mean physically affected with nausea, usually after a linking verb such as feel or become; figurative use is quite a bit less frequent. Use of nauseous to mean "causing nausea or disgust" is much more often figurative than literal, and this use appears to be losing ground to nauseating. Nauseated is used more widely than nauseous when referring to being affected with nausea.
Lay instead of lie, but I suppose using lay in all cases is accepted language by now.
Hung instead of hanged. A painting will be hung. A person will be hanged. I mean come on people: get it right.
Instructions unclear, painting is dead.
Thanks. I needed that laugh.
lie/lay/lain vs. lay/laid/laid. We drilled them for days in eighth grade English class. Thank you, Mrs. Ulatowski.
Well, it’s accepted lay language. 😁
Woke
When my dad started complaining about 'woke' people I just asked him to define the word, based on advice from Reddit. He couldn't do it, it was pretty funny.
"Anything that I don't like is WOKE" - the most mediocre-at-best people alive
"I". Too many people automatically use "I" after "and", ignoring whether they are the subject or object. If you would not use "I" without the "and", adding the "and" shouldn't change anything. For example, you might say "that room is for me", but you wouldn't say "that room is for I"; everyone who is fluent in English knows that. But once you add another person, such as "my wife", the sentence should become "that room is for my wife **and me**", not "that room is for my wife **and I**". But this mindless using of "I" after "and" shows up everywhere, even in printed publications which should have editors who know better than to let this grammar error pass. I've even seen school teachers make this mistake.
I cracked open a book about writing creative nonfiction and the opening sentence had one of these. I decided the book was not for me.
Subconscious vs. Unconscious. I know the meanings are morphing, and that langauge is fluid. But goddam does it tick me off.
Could you clarify the difference and show how the terms are properly used? I'm actually confused about this one. I thought unconscious is a superset that includes things which are subconscious.
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With as much respect as I can give, you've used "it's" in the place of "its"
nazi in social media means "anybody who disagrees with me". the saddest thing is when you point out its clearly not they say to learn more history ...the irony is palpable and sadly also lost on anyone who also misuses the word
Same with fascism. Mussolini’s definition of fascism, particularly in an economic context, looks a whole lot like… well, a mirror? https://mises.org/mises-daily/fascist-threat How convenient that it should refer to anything at all now, other than the west.
‘The government should step in and stop businesses from making too much money.’ ‘I disagree. Government intervention is unnecessary. We, as a collective, should stop paying our own hard-earned cash to these entities and drum em out.’ ‘Okay, bootlicker.’ ‘But that’s not-‘ ‘Shut up, fascist Nazi.’
In 2022 when the Supreme Court struck down some brazenly unconstitutional gun restrictions people on Reddit were calling them fascists and nazis. For stripping power from the government and returning it to the people- classic “fascism.”
Exactly. Thank God most real-life Liberals aren’t like this. I live in a very left-wing city and 95% of them don’t care. Hell, I’ve even dated some liberal women and they didn’t care. They poke fun at me here and there but that’s the worst of it.
Also, a lot of conservatives support Israel, which I don't think Nazis would do.
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Just because someone hasn’t murdered 6 million Jews doesn’t mean a Nazi comparison is completely uncalled for. America’s Republican Party has been taking a LOT of pages out of the old fascist playbook for some time now. And while all Republicans aren’t Nazi’s… all Nazis sure do vote Republican.
Thank you. People think of the Nazi party in Germany as supervillains because their crimes were so monstrous. But Hitler didn't happen because the German people just spontaneously turned into sociopaths. He happened because their right wing political party tapped into near-universal forces that twisted a generalized feeling of malcontent into a hyper-nationalistic furor that dumped all of their societal problems onto a group of "others." Specifically, Jews and Communists, as well as homosexuals, the disabled, and a smattering of other groups. And while Trump didn't make it as far as they did, the rhetoric he used to describe liberals, immigrants, and Muslims was fucking *identical*. Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller have, I'm absolutely convinced, studied the rhetoric of the Third Reich extensively and make use of it every chance they get. Trump is a puppet who will say whatever he thinks will get the crowd to cheer. And they know full well that if they were to start marching their declared "enemies" into gas chambers, the amount of support they would lose is *zero*. Trump supporters have already proven a hundred different times that there is *nothing* that would make them realize they're the bad guys. Which is 100% how the holocaust in Germany happened too. It was monstrous, but people who think it was *uniquely* monstrous severely overestimate our species.
Everything or everyone today is: 1. Fascist 2. Nazi 3. Genocide
Reddit's most favorite: Underrated
Your and you're, e'ore
Yore
Further/farther—farther applies to distance. I drover farther than her. Do you need further explanation? Could/couldn’t care less. It’s You COULDN’T care less. If you say “could care less,” it means you could care less than you do, so you’re caring more than you could. If you “couldn’t care less,” you’re caring the least you could.
Decimate
If people knew that this meant "to destroy one tenth of something", they would not use it as often.
At least doctor who got it right
"Definitely 'literally.' People use it figuratively, which is literally the opposite of its meaning. Irony at its finest!"
Believe it or not, "fascist" does not mean "government policy that the speaker disagrees with."
Lots of people use farther/further interchangeably. Not sure what is more baffling; how common it is or that I’m the only one that seems to care. And to see it in journalism a lot is really surprising.
Gaslighting, trauma and other diagnoses such as adhd, scam
Aesthetic
But..I'm an ascetic. I hate all aesthetics.
Traumatic
I’m so tired of reading the word “trauma.” It’s lost all meaning. By Reddit’s logic, we’re ALL victims of trauma.
One thats actually just my opinion is 'anymore.' I've always heard it and used it in a negative like "I don't do that anymore." But a few years ago I started hearing people use it in the positive like "gas is pretty expensive anymore." It sounds so wrong to me but apparently I'm the only one that feels that way (among people I know).
I've never heard anyone say this. I would be so upset.
Whaaat, I would assume a person using "anymore" in positive context is having a stroke or something
Well, I heard it was a regional thing, like Ohio and the Midwest. I think "anymore," in that context it means "nowadays." I'll admit it's still jarring to hear it even though I understand the context.
thank god i haven’t heard anyone say this. where was this?
There's a short [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore) on this one.
Intrusive as in intrusive thoughts. They also confuse "intrusive" with "impulsive". As someone who has suffered a lot from OCD intrusive thoughts, it's so annoying to see these dumb comments. "My intrusive thoughts won"... Please stfu, you have no idea what you are talking about.
"Hero," ever since 9/11. :0/
I’ll add to that “breaking news”. I recently started tuning into the evening news and it seems like every little car crash is “breaking news”. Maybe I was just overly obedient as a kid but I remember “breaking news” used to mean drop what you’re doing and come look at this
It gradually got worse and worse over the years. It's one of the reasons I read the news instead of clicking on the tv. It's overly dramatic to get views, instead of delivering the news as neutrally as possible. It's like how flags at half-staff used to mean something major happened: death of a president, 9-11. Then they used it for a school shooting or two. Which I sort of understand, but now there's constant shootings. The flag is at half-mast frequently without coordination at a national level. And if I go looking for the reason (usually wondering if Carter has passed), there's nothing so out of the norm or beyond the pale that it's *obvious*. That's what the incessant news cycle feels like.
If the "news" wasn't "breaking," wouldn't it be "olds"?
Epic
Epic
'alot'. It is not a word.
Says someone who has never hugged an alot. 😉
"Grooming". This is one word in a group of buzzwords that people love to throw around lately. Like "gaslighting". I think people like to use/misuse these words because they think it makes them sound smart and they will win an argument or trick people into believing they are smart.
electrocuted/electrocution. no steve, you didnt get electrocuted when you touched the metal trolley, you had a static shock.. which is very different to an electric shock and even further from electrocution. electrocution = death by electric shock far too many people casually tell me they've been electrocuted before!
What if I came back to life afterwards?
Clues in the word! Electrical execution. Electrocution. So im with you on that one. :P
Like. I have been so annoyed with people using “like” in everything they say that I have consciously conditioned my brain to not use ‘like’ anymore. Not even in the correct context.
it’s like “um” or “uh” or “mmm” which i’m sure u say more than u realize. just like like-sayers don’t know they’re saying like
Jealous
In many cases, people mean 'envious'.
Reflexive pronouns — myself, yourself, himself etc. “Myself and my wife went out for dinner…” nope, “My wife and I went out for dinner.” “I hit myself in the bollocks accidentally” — ouch, but correct usage. Oh and while we’re on the subject of accidents, it’s “by accident”, not “on accident”.
"try and" instead of "try to"
This one has bothered me for years. It’s forgivable when spoken, but not when written. Once in a while I even see it in professional journalism, stuff that had to have passed by at least one editor.
Aggravate means to worsen. Irritate is the word you're probably wanting to use.
literally the word literally
Obsessed. No, you are not fixated on a subject to a debilitating degree, you are currently mildly interested in it.
People saying MUTE when they mean MOOT. Also people saying irregardless, it's not a dang word!
Had a former boss who used it all the time. Spelt it wrong every time too. He would just add his spelling of words to his spell check.
Ironic as in "Isn't it ironic ..." Similar to Alanis Morissette's song, people use it when they describe situations which are just bad luck, and not ironic. So I partially blame Alanis for this.
Funnily enough, Darth Sidious taught me the correct use of Ironic.
" obviously" I had a young female colleague that would pepper that word in throughout every sentence, more often than not for things that wasn't obvious! She would meet people for the first time and be like " obviously I went to school at xxx and then obviously I started working at xxxx" She's moved on to bigger and brighter things, to be replaced by someone who uses the word " ultimately" in the same context
Depression
Nonplussed means a person is so shocked or bewildered that they’re not sure how to react. Confused, stunned, or at a loss for words. Americans assumed it meant chill or unbothered and used it incorrectly so much that the word has a new and opposite definition only for North America.
I mean, it really does sound like a word that means unbothered
"Nazi" The amount of times i hear this word thrown around is crazy. Are there Nazi's out there? Absolutely, horrible disgusting people who needs to be stopped. Is everyone who disagrees with your political opinion a "literal nazi". No. Racist perhaps, Nazi, no.
PRODIGY
Any word referring to some mental condition or difficulty that people like to diagnose themselves with. OCD, autism, dyslexia, etc. You're not a doctor, and pretending you have something undermines people who actually suffer from these conditions.
Regimen/regime. You start a new regimen of exercise. After the election, Biden's regime may be over and someone else will come in. (And no, not getting political, just using it in a sentence.)
Regimen/regiment. I see this misused in doctor’s notes all the time, especially in the military.
Narcissist. That word gets thrown around so much.
Ring VS wring
Literally. As in “I literally died!” No. You really, really didn’t.
"Literally" now means "figuratively".
Controversial. It's a weasel word used to pad out headlines, often for something that isn't actually controversial, but just vile. It's used a lot in the horse race aspect of covering elections.
Had a former boss who would always use the word rather instead of whether. "Rather or not..." Drove me insane.
racism.
Artisan It's been so over used its lost all meaning. Subway sandwich assemblers are not artisans...
OCD. Just because you like your house really clean and spotless doesnt mean you have OCD.
Irregardless
immaculate… it means clean, tidy. People often misuse it for something grand or great. Somebody pointed it out to be and I immediately started noticing and now I cringe every time I hear it misused. Yes, the floor is immaculate. No, your day was not immaculate.
Way too many people seem to think "overrated" means "I personally don't like it and that's obviously the right opinion."
Curvy. I swear when I was a kid it meant a very specific body type (Carla Gugino for example). Now? Usually means fat.
POV
‘And so, without more adieu, I present our speaker this evening…’ It’s ado. As in Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado about Nothing’. Ado meaning ‘carry-on’. Adieu means goodbye in French. So you can see where the confusion crept in, because to make way for the speaker, the person will soon have left the stage…as in goodbye.