Hi Guys! If you can tear yourself away from watching wall-to-wall news about baby Sussex (it’s a BOY!!) Isn’t it great that the Royals have managed to make babies? And they suffer from sleep deprivation, rather like us.
Modern-day nannies and mannies! What are they like? They must be so up themselves these days that they can’t even be bothered to rouse themselves from their slumbers.
Doesn’t four-year-old Princess Charlotte look like the Queen? The Duchess of Cambridge is so talented. Her photographs of her children are much more professional than the snaps and selfies that we ordinary people are always showing off. Hers are beautifully constructed, not even a tiny bit blurred, and their cute little heads are nearly always captured in full, and not cut off.
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| (although she does sometimes cut off the feet) |
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Grammatical errors. What are they like? Who doesn’t make them?? I know I do. Commas are a particular worry (too many, and your prose resembles a teenager’s diary; too few will muffle the meaning.)
Why is it so much easier to spot typos, mistakes and proof-reading misses after the horse has bolted? I can be a bit of a pedant myself, though I’m not really as pompous as all that. How embarrassing it is when you're publicly hoisted by your own pedantry.
The rule is that your own mistakes mostly happen when you’re pointing out the mistake(s) of others.
Don’t you hate that certain double-negatives are so commonplace that they’ve morphed into legitimate substitutes for their opposite meaning, as in “I ain’t done nuffink”. It’s sooo annoying.
What about when two synonymous words are amalgamated to produce a meaningless portmanteau word. The likely intention is to add emphasis, but the actual effect is to cancel itself out. For example, merging ‘regardless” and “irrespective” creates the non-word “irregardless”. What does that even mean?
Am I the only one who cares when people accidentally substitute “underestimate” for ‘overestimate’? You want to stress how large (or small) something is, so you might say: it (Whatever it is) cannot be underestimated (or vice versa.) All too often it comes out the wrong way round, completely reversing the meaning. Listen out for this, please, because I don’t want to be the only one fretting about it and I want others to join me.
I inherited this bugbear, but it still bugs me when people miss out a whole syllable from the word ‘deteriorate’ and nonchalantly blurt out “deteri’ate” as if they’d just said something smart.
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Last and probably least, is this the only household where people have favourite utensils? But not in a casual way. “I can’t eat with that fork!” “I don’t like that cup/bowl/plate/chair.”
“You can’t use that cup!” comes a scream just as the coffee is about to be taken out to the builder and the contents of the revered cup are then decanted with a shaky hand (partly into a smaller mug and partly into the sugar bowl) and another devastating faux pas is averted.
