Political Crossfire Forums

Huge f**k pet peeve of mine.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/10583 ... rgery.html

Poisonous!? POISONOUS!?!? Oh its venomous. THEN POISONOUS AGAIN!?!?!

No. Its "venomous." Unless that spider secretes a toxin then uses its legs to rub the toxin on its fangs, its a f**k venom if a spider bite causes an injury/illness/death. Not a hard f**k concept to understand:

Cobra. Bites you and injects you with venom. Its venomous.
Poison Dart Frogs. You touch them and you can die. Thats poisonous.

f**k journalistic integrity man. Might as well have 5th graders write articles if we're just going to start using words that don't even have similar meanings so interchangeably.

It's something bad. That's I think the point they're trying to get across. Yeah I misuse words all the time but I figure if I'm writing for a mass audience I should probably clarify the meaning of my speech. Although isn't that how language evolves, through use of words in inappropriate contexts?

colloquialisms? not in my english language!

Its dumb. I hate society. Pretty soon we'll just devolve to being cavemen and just say variations of "unga bunga" for everything.

it is a colloquialism. it's an informal use of a word, based around a common meaning/usage.

so i hope you've never called something awesome when you actually meant impressive. or said the speed of something was instant. or that the best of something was the ultimate.

the list goes on. the number (not the amount, be careful!) of words you wrongly use on a daily basis is something that might surprise you.

Most people couldn't tell you the difference between a motor and an engine. In cooking, broth and stock are used seemingly interchangeably, even though they are very different things. Dinner and supper are different, but are interchangeable these days. Etc etc.

One that annoys me endlessly is when people call diesel fuel simply diesel. Or worse, diesel gas. Diesel oil is less annoying, as it is technically at least correct. The type of engine is called a diesel, named after the inventor. Not the fuel it burns. Its a diesel engine and burns diesel fuel.

Oh...and data transfer speeds are usually expressed in bits. So your ISP sells you data in Mbps. This is not megabytes. Its megabits. There are 8 bits in a byte. So if you have 6 Mbps internet your best download rate is going to be 750Kb/sec. You are not downloading at the megabit rate in megabytes.

/rant

and doing a kickflip isn't awesome, witnessing the face of cthulhu is. you aren't having a terrific day unless you just saw the gates of tartarus open up. you didn't get there instantly, because instant is a point in time, not a description of speed. you aren't nauseous, you're nauseated. was that train wreck a travesty? i hope not, because satire shouldn't be that painful and destructive. think all those memos about the important meeting friday are redundant? of course you don't, because they're not obsolete. what you meant was repetitive. did you imply you were unsatisifed with your service at the restaurant when you talked to your waiter about the bill or did you infer you were?

and let's not get in to things like medical or scientific terminology.

on and on and on and on. those are all common, colloquial uses of words that are completely wrong. venomous and poisonous are no different.

Don't really see the difference.. If the guy is bitten and dies would you say he was poisoned or envenomated?