English speakers, what's a not-fluency-related quirk/modification of the language that annoys you when you see it?
English speakers, what's a not-fluency-related quirk/modification of the language that annoys you when you see it?
Yes yes, language changes over time. I've heard that mantra for decades and I know it. That doesn't mean there aren't language changes that aren't grating when they become fashionable (and hopefully temporary).
For me, "morals" being used as a crude catch-all application of "morality," "ethics," "integrity" or related concepts bothers me. Sentence example: "Maybe if society had morals there wouldn't be so many minorities in prison." 
An even more annoying otherwise-fluent-speaker modification I see is when "conscious" is used to mean "consciousness" and "conscience" interchangeably. Sentence example: "Single mothers on welfare that steal baby formula have no conscious." It sounds like they're saying the shoplifter is not mentally aware of their own actions, not that they're lacking sufficient "morals" to let their baby starve for the sake of Rules-Based Order(tm).
There's others, but those two come up enough recently, with sufficient newness, for me to bring them up here. Some old classic language quirks are so established and entrenched that even though I hate them, bringing them up would likely invite some hatemail and maybe some mystery alt accounts also sending hatemail after that. You know, because they "could care less(sic)" about what I think. 
English had a big French spelling phase, so a bunch of our words have entirely different phonetic sounds vs their spelling. I constantly mess this up. Go ahead, make me spell bourgoise or bureacracy the first time. Nope failed again! Conscious/Conscience are definitely in that category.
For me I'm not sure if Math or Maths are correct
"could care less"
THIS
"it means the same thing!" they say
IF COULD CARE LESS MEANS THE SAME AS COULD NOT CARE LESS THEN THE WORD "NOT" IS ENTIRELY MEANINGLESS
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAI really hate the misuse of the word "pretentious." A lot of people use it to mean something like "pompous" when it's root is "pretense." It's only pretentious if someone is dissembling about how much they know about something. If someone actually knows as much about a subject as the appear to then it doesn't matter how annoying they are, it's still not pretentious.
And that's my very specific pet peeve. And having this opinion is itself extremely annoying, but it's still not pretentious goddamnit
Corpo-speak e-mails from bloviating, self-important middle managers who regurgitate such turns of phrase as "at this time" and/or "in a timely manor [sic]" make my eye twitch. I can overlook a lot of the "synergizing our thought leaders with operational tempo" jargon salad, but the aforementioned phrases trigger my fight-or-flight response, probably because they reek of petty tyrant small business night manager mentality and bring me back to the headspace of dealing with bosses like that when I was a kid.
I also once had to work with an IT project manager who insisted on pronouncing the word "processes" as if it had a long-E vowel sound in the plural ("pro-cess-eez"). It would derail my train of thought every fucking time.
Also also once had a direct supervisor who would throw around "irregardless" almost daily.
"_ and I" hypercorrection, or maybe reanalysis if we're being more descriptivist.
It's an interesting subject, and I'm kind of split on it as an amateur linguist, but as an English speaker it sticks out like a sore thumb to me. I think English prescriptivism has pushed the order of pronouns in collective noun/pronoun phrases too much (eg. he and I, not I and him), and people have started to reanalyze the phrase as a noun phrase in itself, but not everyone so it sounds weird to a slice of the population. Then there's disjunctive pronouns that throws a wrench in the works.
Note: asterisk means it sounds ungrammatical to speakers of the language in linguistics (me in this case), no asterisk means okay to say. Also later correct reformulation means it's less common but still correct:
Alice, Bob and I are going.
*I are going.
I am going.
Me, Alice, and Bob are going.
*Me are going.
*Me am going.
Want to join me?
*Want to join I?
*Want to join Alice, Bob and I? <-- this is the one that annoys me, but you might think it's fine
Want to join Alice, Bob and me?
Alice and Bob aren't going probably, but me, I'm going for sure
Alice and Bob aren't going probably, but I, I'm going for sure
It's me who is going
It's me who am going <-- this is pushing it
It's I who is going
It's I who am going <-- actually acceptable, but I still do a double take
Alice and Bob like to go more than me
Alice and Bob like to go more than I
I hate linguistic prescriptionism and believe all English is fine if people understand what you mean, so things like this just gives me ammo to bother others in the future.
I could care less about conscious vs conscious before, but now that I know it slightly annoys others I'll never spell it with the e ever again
The reframing of "politics" to whatever people think it means. My cliffnotes of "politics" is "engaging with social relations through the lens of power", not "stuff people in parliament do" or "minority emancipation " or whatever other extremely reductive definition people use.
I keep class signifiers out of conversation, but things like "eckspecially" or "nucular" annoy me. But that's my dad's elitist elocution coming through.
X-of instead of X-have.
"Well actually ", "Consider" and other codewords that suggest I am about to receive a take of breathtaking innanity and self-importance
Doubling down on the "I could care less" as a misinterpretation of "I couldn't care less".
The phrase "I could not care less" means someone doesn't care whatsoever. Saying "I could care less" implies the person does care. I had no idea how widespread it was until I started using US websites.
Also, it doesn't so much annoy me, but
spoiler
gendered language. using neutral terms for everything is actually easier and simplifies the language.
"Cue" means "to indicate to another party that it is now time to undertake a previously planned action"
"Queue" means "to line up neatly"
They are not interchangeable and the only explanation I can think of is people seeing "queue" on their phone's music player and thinking that means "start music"
Oh and while I'm whining "discreet" means "secret" and "discrete" means "its own separate thing" GET IT RIGHT
I can't think of abutting that truly bothers me (languages are always changing and I think that's neat), but one thing that throws me off because it's not a feature of my dialect is using "whenever" to also mean "when" (i.e. both reoccurring and momentary), which is found in some Southern dialects (among others). Sometimes the meaning is immediately clear from context, but other times it's ambiguous and so there's a jarring moment where my initial analysis suddenly stops making sense and I realize the speaker must have this feature. Not great at coming up with examples, but something like this:
Whenever I took a shower, the water was too hot and I got burned.
In context it would probably be clear that the speaker is talking about a specific event, but in isolation I have to go, "Wait, I doubt that they kept getting burned every time they took a shower...must be momentary".
Positive anymore (e.g. "I wear these shoes a lot anymore" to mean "I wear these shoes a lot these days") is kind of similar in terms of vibes, but the meaning is always clear even devoid of context so I just find it cute more than anything.
There's this other tiny thing which I must have read or watched a video about ages ago (wish I could remember the specific source) that doesn't annoy me or impair my understanding but I can't unhear:
Grammatical nitpicking that will permanently adhere to your brain
Since we're so used to saying the sentence pattern "it's because [...]", the vast, vast majority of people will also say "the reason is because...", in essence swapping "it" for the more specific noun phrase "the reason". It's such a natural construction that I never noticed it until it was pointed out, but from a prescriptivist grammatical point of view the "because" is redundant and doesn't fit--it should simply be "the reason is...", since the clause that follows "because" is itself the reason for whatever you're explaining. Other than the simple pattern of construction, another explanation is that it's a sort of emphatic double positive in line with saying "the reason why"--using both "reason" and "why" is redundant, strictly speaking, but it drives home the explanatory function of the utterance. Sometimes you'll even hear the trifecta: "the reason why is because [...]".
As I said, it doesn't annoy me at all, but my ears always perk up when I hear the first three words because I'm wondering what the speaker will say. I think easily 95+% of people say the "incorrect" thing, even incredibly bright people with excellent language skills. If I hear the "correct" version, I take it to indicate that the speaker is someone who thinks carefully about their words; doesn't necessarily mean they actually have useful things to say, but I like to think it's a tiny window into their personality
I just remembered I pointed this "error" out to my examiner when I was getting a neuropsych eval (normally I'd never do that, but I did it in a playful way because she was evaluating my language skills), which probably contributed to me being formally diagnosed as a turbonerd.
😨 As a bad English speaker I am scared now
I remember malding pretty hard from a book that kept on using the word "whence." And it wasn't some book about Elizabethan poetry or some shit. It was a random probability math textbook printed in 2010 or something. Literally some random book that kept on using that word. I don't think I've ever encountered "whence" before or since. It was all contained in that single book where every other page had that fucking word.
I don't understand the author's obsession with that word.
I don't understand why the author couldn't just use the word "where" like every other textbook.
And for the kicker, I still don't fucking know what that word actually means. What is it about the word "whence" that makes it different from the word "where" because surely the author would have an actual reason to use the word "whence" instead of the word "where?"
When people get all weird about distinguishing "ethics" and "morals," and when they're afraid to just call things good or bad. In Catholic high school one of my teachers said the difference was that atheists can only be ethical and not moral and that seemed like a load of bull so I just use them interchangeably. But now people seen to make the distinction in the other direction, what with the whole, "Up yours, woke moralists!" bit
Anyone who fucks around with these word games is hiding something, possibly even from themselves. Ethical, moral, good, beneficial, productive, pro-social, I don't care what term you wanna use, if it's good it's good and if it's bad it's bad. When someone says their views are ethical but not moral or moral but not ethical, get ready to hear some fucked up shit.
Maybe there's some academic distinction where it's meaningful and ok but I'm just going off personal experience.
imma be tbh with you i dont know if ive ever noticed someone saying "i could care less", as far as i can tell this only exists in this exact sort of meta-discussion