Totally irrelevant

Since I'm in such a fantastic mood these days, and by fantastic I mean exhausted and irritable, I thought I'd post about something that annoys me-- inappropriate word usage. Now, I'm really more of a math/science person so it may surprise some of you that this bothers me, but it does. I attribute this to reading too many classic books and taking too many honors and advanced placement English/Literature classes in high school. (Because trust me, I didn't get any of this from college.)

I'm not talking about common easy to make mistakes like when to use good vs. well, or mixing up your and you're, or they're, there, and their. That stuff does bother me, but considering what a superb job the American school system does, those mistakes don't surprise me. What I'm talking about is blatant misuse of words and everyday use of "words" that don't exist. Here's what I mean:

"nother" as in: "that's a whole nother issue." That isn't a word. I'm not sure why people think that breaking up the word "another" and sticking "whole" in the middle of it is ok, but it drives me crazy. This is mostly just something people say, but I have on more than one occasion seen it in print in a newspaper which pretty much makes me want to cry.

"alot" That's not a word, that's TWO words! What really makes me wonder about this one is why people only want to combine "a lot" into one word. Nobody makes this mistake with "a little." It boggles my mind.

Using "we" to describe something that is really only happening to one person. I mostly see this with people who say "we're pregnant!" Unless it's two women announcing at the same time that they're both pregnant, this is wrong. "We're having a baby" is fine, "we're expecting" is true, but "we" are not pregnant.

Sticking "engineer" into a job title just so it sounds better. Let me just tell you, unless you spent college getting a B.S. in engineering you're NOT an engineer. Janitors are not "sanitation engineers," sales people aren't "sales engineers," and people who stock shelves aren't "warehouse engineers." It's ridiculously frustrating to have to explain to people that I'm an engineer because I have an engineering degree and not because someone stuck it in my job title.

Calling any large purchase an "investment." An investment is something where you expect more money back than you started with. That means that anything that only depreciates cannot be considered an investment. Cars, computers, entertainment systems, etc. are not investments. Just because something is expensive does not make it an "investment."

Anyway, I'm done rambling about this. I told Brian he needs to write some more posts because I don't think I'll have anything amusing to say until after this baby is born. And hopefully that's soon so I don't have to write any more posts about stuff that annoys me. Even though I'm sure you all thoroughly enjoyed this one:)