pet peeve thread

[Vampyr]

Dove Soap adverts that pretend that Dove is not soap.

[Trinidad]

Dove Soap adverts that pretend that Dove is not soap.

I don't have the composition of Dove Soap at hand, but technically they are probably correct.

 

A soap is a salt of a fatty acid (e.g. sodium stearate or potassium oleate). Many soaps are good surfactants which means to non-chemists that they can be used to remove grease when washing with water. But there are many surfactants that are not soaps.

 

So it is perfectly possible to make a soap free "soap bar" from these other surfactants.

 

Rik

[Vampyr]

So it is perfectly possible to make a soap free "soap bar" from these other surfactants.

 

Wow, I didn't know that.

[barmar]

One of the columnists in my town newspaper wrote this week about pet peeves, in response to a podcast about a book Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us. She'd started making a list of her pet peeves.

 

One of her peeves is people who get their pronouns wrong (e.g. "between you and I"). Then she remembered a time when her daughter came home from school after getting into a fight with her best friend, because the daughter had inherited the habit of correcting people's grammar and had pulled it on her friend, who found it annoying. Luckily, the girls eventually laughed it off, but still...

 

After recalling that incident, she tossed the list she was making.

[Vampyr]

One of her peeves is people who get their pronouns wrong (e.g. "between you and I").

 

This is a pet peeve of a lot of people I know.

[kenberg]

Last night Friendly Persuasion was on TCM. I had never seen it so I thought I would give it a try. Gary Cooper and all were portraying Quakers, so they said "thee" a lot. I didn't hear any "thou"s, although I am pretty sure some of the "thee"s should have been "thou"s. . I found the movie unwatchable so maybe there was a "thou" or two later on, I can't say.

When I suggested after fifteen minutes or so that we try something else my wife's reaction was "What took thee so long?".

[GreenMan]

One of her peeves is people who get their pronouns wrong (e.g. "between you and I"). Then she remembered a time when her daughter came home from school after getting into a fight with her best friend, because the daughter had inherited the habit of correcting people's grammar and had pulled it on her friend, who found it annoying. Luckily, the girls eventually laughed it off, but still...

 

After recalling that incident, she tossed the list she was making.

 

Being an editor by trade (and a pretty competent one by all accounts), I used to peeve like that on grammar mistakes and so forth. Somewhere along the way I saw the same light your columnist saw. Now my biggest peeve is other peevers. :angry: Especially, as often happens, when the peever is wrong and the target has made no mistake.

[barmar]

IMO, the only people who have the right (and perhaps even duty) to correct others' grammar unsolicited are teachers with their students, and parents with their children. And maybe also vice versa. In most other cases, it's just rude and condescending.

 

BTW, the completion of the story about the little girls is that after the daughter corrected her friend's mistake, the friend said "You think you're smarter than me?", and the daughter said "That should be 'smarter than I'" -- and that's when they started laughing, because it became so "meta". Not to mention that practically everyone says "smarter than me".

[gwnn]

Babies on the airplane. No, I don't care what I did when I was their age and yes, I know the parents have to put up with them for most of the day. I still reserve my right to be annoyed when they decide to cry like their life depended upon it for the whole flight. My favourite scene was with a 5-yo girl who sat with his dad next to me and wouldn't buckle her seatbelt at takeoff. When simply ignoring her dad's nice and reasonable arguments was no longer enough for her she decided that shouting in my ears was the next measure to be taken.

http://i.imgur.com/zwwPo.jpg :)

[Fluffy]

I think if my daughter decides that screaming in my ear is a good idea I will slap her.

[blackshoe]

I think if my daughter decides that screaming in my ear is a good idea I will slap her.

In this country, if you do that in public, you're likely to have Child Services take the kid away from you and the cops put you in jail. Of course, in many ways the US today is insane.

[phikappaph]

please enter a password between 8 and 12 characters long but which includes at least three of the following four groups:

(...)

please do not use intelligible words, any variations thereof, date of birth, passwords from other sites, anything that has anything to do with you.

 

DO NOT WRITE DOWN YOUR PASSWORD ANYWHERE.

 

isn't this getting out of control?

 

anyway, what is your pet peeve?

 

 

Funny you should start with that. A little off color which is needed for the story but an absolutely hilarious email was sent to me about passwords and something I have an issue with every time I have to reset a password:

-----------------------------------------------

Resetting The Password

 

 

"Sorry, your password has been in use for 30 days and has expired - you must register a new one."

 

roses

 

"Sorry, too few characters."

 

pretty roses

 

"Sorry, you must use at least one numerical character."

 

1 pretty rose

 

"Sorry, you cannot use blank spaces."

 

1prettyrose

 

"Sorry, you must use at least 10 different characters."

 

1*****prettyrose

 

"Sorry, you must use at least one upper case character."

 

1*****prettyrose

 

"Sorry, you cannot use more than one upper case character consecutively."

 

1*****PrettyRose

 

"Sorry, you must use no fewer than 20 total characters."

 

1*****PrettyRoseShovedUpYourAssIfYouDon'tGiveMeAccessRight*****Now.

 

"Sorry, you cannot use punctuation."

 

1*****PrettyRoseShovedUpYourAssIfYouDontGiveMeAccessRight*****Now

 

"Sorry, that password is already in use."

[broze]

People often moan about others having their headphones too loud on public transport. I don't really understand this. The journey isn't going to be too long and it's not like there aren't other noises! This just comes across as intolerant.

 

However what I CANNOT stand is people with excessively loud headphones *in libraries*. Why so loud??? It's already very quiet and so it's just inconsiderate. :angry:

[mycroft]

If I get distracted because I can *almost* figure out what you're listening to, it's really annoying even if there are other noises.

If I can hear your thud thud thud *through* what I'm listening to, it's really annoying even if there are other noises (note, if I can hear your half of the cellphone conversation through what I'm listening to, it's just as bad)

If I'm reading, that kind of niggling "I almost have it" noise is impossible to tune out, even as I can tune out conversations I can understand.

 

So, yeah, I get that one.

[barmar]

The book I mentioned earlier has lots of discussions about why certain sounds, like someone talking on a cellphone, are more annoying than others. In the case of a cellphone, part of the reason is that you're hearing a "halfalogue" -- you can only hear half of the conversation, and this frustrates the part of your brain that can't help trying to follow what it's overhearing, but it's confusing.

 

Loud headphones are similar -- you can almost hear it, and this grabs the attention of your brain, but then it gets frustrated trying to make it out. Also, some frequency ranges tend to leak out more than others. What results is often a buzz, similar to insect noises, that we're instinctively sensitive to.

[mycroft]

one of the problems with cellphones is that people hear a very quiet speaker, so their brain says "need to be loud, or they can't hear me either"; I can be next to a table having a conversation that I don't even notice, and then as soon as the phone comes out, I can hear every word. Yes, it's a halfalogue, but it's *louder* than the conversation.

 

You can train yourself out of that instinct, but it takes it being pointed out.

[Vampyr]

So, yeah, I get that one.

 

I do too, though I don't try to figure out what the music is. It is just annoying, and unlike other noises, it is right next to your ear if you are unlucky enough to have one of those loud-headphone-people in the next seat.

 

And it's a very unpleasant noise, too. (LOL I had this on the Tube about half an hour ago).

[gwnn]

"Funniest autocorrect fails" compilations. More than the utter fakeness and boringness that they represent, I am most annoyed by how many people seem to think that they are somehow the best sort of internet humour.

[Antrax]

Oh, so you prefer image macros and rage comics? THOSE are, quite literally, the antithesis of humor.

 

While I'm ranting about this, there's a whole brand of modern humor where the mere fact you know the subject matter is somehow supposed to be funny. I gave up on understanding it after a local TV program had a "sketch" about angry birds that was basically a puppet play about how the birds and the pigs try to sign a peace agreement or something. They did the voices pretty well, but there were no jokes. It was just those characters thrown in a random setting without any satire value or observation any surprise or utterly anything at all that counts as humor.

Naturally the thing went viral - you might've even seen it. I asked several people what's funny about it, and thus earned the coveted status of the world's biggest douche, but no understanding of this trend. Then I gave up, people are clearly enjoying themselves using templates for humor in lieu of wit.

[gwnn]

Oh, so you prefer image macros and rage comics? THOSE are, quite literally, the antithesis of humor.

I don't prefer one over another but I get more peeved by the fake autocorrect pictures.

[helene_t]

people posting text as images on facebook

[barmar]

I do too, though I don't try to figure out what the music is.

Not consciously. But there's a part of your brain that's always on the lookout for sounds that might be pertinent (it's the part that helps you immediately recognize someone calling your name, or the voice of a family member in as crowd). It's constantly trying to figure out if there's anything important in ambient sounds, so that it can draw your attention to them. When there's something that almost sounds recognizable, it energizes to try to figure out if it's meaningful or noise.

 

None of this is conscious, but it gets reflected in the feeling of annoyance.

[Fluffy]

people posting text as images on facebook

 

This annoyed me as well, but there is a reason behind it, facebook promotes image's status over text ones or something like Its more facebook's fault.

 

Worse for me is not being able to translate some text in a nordic language.

[Fluffy]

Spannish assholes translating 'remove' as 'remover' (which means to move repeatedly normaly in a cooking context, IOW to stir), I see this so frequently it drives me crazy. And its far from being at user level, companies do it constantly.

[Phil]

In my new place of employment, roughly 20% of the people I work with have an annoying habit of adding a superfluous "right" at the end of sentences. Technically it should be followed by a question mark, but the person isn't actually pausing to ask a question, since the stream-of-consciousness is not abated. By inserting "right", the speaker appears to seek concurrence, but in fact its a monologue.

 

Put into bridgespeak, it would sound like this:

 

"You're in 4♠ and the opening lead is a trump, so the first thing you do is count tricks, right. Working on a long suit is a key theme to these hands, so knock out the ♦A now, right. Regain the lead, ruff one the heart loser, right".

 

So annoying.