Reply to Your single biggest grammar pet peeve?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]When people put a qualifier with “unique”, which means one of a kind so it cannot be compared. It is incorrect to say very unique or a little unique or less unique.  It’s just unique.

Also forte is pronounced without the e, like fort. [/quote]

I thought it was pronounced "for-tay"[/quote]

Only by rubes or Italians. [/quote]

According to Merriam-Webster, both pronunciations are correct.[/quote]

DP. Yes, now both pronunciations are correct but that’s only because people so commonly mispronounced it as fort-ay for so many years that the incorrect pronunciation became accepted. This happens often…people mess up a word so much that it becomes the common parlance and is actually eventually accepted into the lexicon.[/quote]

That is how language develops[/quote]

Now one would sound like a pretentious tw@t insisting upon the French pronunciation.[/quote]

Nasty comment but back when I was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth, we were taught that pronouncing anything in it's foreign pronunciation was wrong. Thus fort vs fortay. [/quote]

“Fort”, when the definition meaning speciality is being used, is correct, but seldom used, unless DCUM pretentiousness is cranked to 10. Fortay refers to the musical usage.

All of these sticklers learned this minutiae from daily emails and grammar nazi blogs.  It doesn’t matter in daily life.  And, frankly, I know many of these rules and I cringe when people conspicuously deploy underused pronunciations or definitions because it is nakedly pretentious.

You are a bunch of Eliza Doolittles.

This is the same phenomenon that is happening in the UK where everyone wants to speak with the Surrey/south of England RP to sound posh.  You’ve got the children east London dock workers sounding like Lord Grantham.  But, it’s all about “Keeping Up Appearances”, I guess.

But it risks erasing the myriad local dialects and accents across Britain.  Here, we hardly have the variation, but clearly many want to erase the little bit of region-specific culture we have.  Assimilate or be destroyed.  Resistance is futile. [/quote]

I feel like I could have written this. Non- linguists can be grammar snoots to the nth degree, but they don't really understand language. [/quote]

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