Back in February, I wrote a post on pet peeves. It turned out to be a rather popular post with a good number of comments. In the intervening months, more things have gotten stuck in my craw, so I thought I would share another group of things that frost my shorts.

  • Bumper stickers. I am not sure why people cover their cars with these things. Those that are supposed to be funny rarely are. Those that are supposed to make you think are cliche. And those that advertise the person’s identity or association with a particular group baffle me, because I am not sure why they think I would want to know the group to which they belong. As for political bumper stickers, I have never known anyone to decide whom to vote for based on someone else’s car.
  • People who think that proper punctuation, grammar, and formatting don’t need to be used when writing e-mail.
  • Restaurants that sell medium, large, and extra-large drinks. I’m not opposed to those sizes, but if you only have three drinks, they should be small, medium, and large.
  • While I am on the subject of drink sizes, Starbucks needs to get rid of the large, grande, and venti. The large is the small. Grande is French and Spanish for large, so it should be the same size as the large. Venti is Italian for twenty, even though the size it represents is twenty-four ounces. Therefore, the sizes are inaccurate, confusing, and misleading respectively, and taken as a whole they are pretentious.
  • A Boston accent. Before moving here I always thought that it was an interesting accent. In large quantities, however, it really grates on my nerves. And then they make fun of my Southern accent . . .
  • “It’s what I like to call X” This phrase drives me nuts. Or more specifically, the way it is used most of the time drives me nuts. Often, people use it to refer to an object by a name which everyone uses. For example, I heard someone on the radio the other day refer to a portable USB drive by saying, “It’s what I like to call a ‘geek stick’.” Yeah, well, so do a lot of people. Saying “It’s what I like to call X” implies that you are the one that came up with that term. If you did, feel free to use that phrase. But if you got the term from someone else, don’t. And don’t use it to make up new terms for items for which we already have good names. The new name is not as clever as you think it is.
  • The Texas Rangers.
  • People who try to “think outside the box” before learning how to think conventionally first. The reason things are conventionally done a particular way is that it works. Whether it is business, theology, creative writing, or music, you can break the rules only after you learn the rules and why they apply most of the time.
  • This brings me to my final pet peeve, the idea that rules were made to be broken. Rules are made to be followed. There may occasionally be reasons to break the rules, but they are by definition the exception and not the . . . um . . . rule.

I could go on, but my new apartment doesn’t allow pets, so I better stop.

Permalink