LinkedIn Poll: "Which writing mistake drives you crazy?"

Good morning!

Thought I'd share this little poll with you all. LinkedIn asked: "Which writing mistake drives you crazy?"

I find the results somewhat surprising. The number one most annoying mistake, as rated by people who took the poll, was homophone misuse (e.g. writing except when you mean accept). This one annoys me too, but I thought "Punctuation abuse" would score much higher than it did.

Also encouraging was the mistake voted second most annoying: "Cliches, passive voice, trite writing." Granted, people who chose to take this poll are more likely than the general population to care about quality writing. But it's encouraging to me because it says to me that a significant number of folks still care about good writing. Sometimes, reading things on the internet, it's easy to think that good writing isn't valued much.

"Words" We Hate

Warning: The editor is ornery today!

Does it bug you when you hear a word that's not really a word -- and may even be totally incorrect -- yet people who say it can't seem to grasp that they're wrong?

Take this example: incent. I hear this all the time, especially in business. As in, "What can we do to incent our staff to work harder?"

It makes me cringe every time. The correct word is incentivize. Saying incent makes it look like (1) you're ignorant of the correct word, (2) you're dying to use the latest business buzzword, and/or (3) you're trying to popularize your own trendy little buzzword even though it's incorrect... or your own shortened version of a buzzword... I mean, really? Is incentivize really that long and cumbersome to pronounce? Do we need nicknames for buzzwords? Wouldn't that be, like, one of the most ridiculous things ever? (Maybe I need to write a separate blog about buzzwords.)

Changing Language

Don't get me wrong. I know word usage changes all the time. I know that over time, nouns get used as verbs or adjectives, and vice versa. Lord knows text wasn't used as a verb until very recently in history.

And yet text as a verb doesn't bother me. Incent does. Maybe because nouns becoming verbs is so common that it seems like a natural, creative progression of the English language to me. whereas incent is just plain wrong.

Another one that makes me cringe is heighth. You know, when people mean to say height, but they slap an extra -th sound onto the end. Maybe this is merely a regional variation, or maybe people who say this are trying to be all egalitarian, not wanting height to be deprived of the same ending sound possessed by its cousins, length and width. I don't know. But for the record, it's wrong.

What's your (non-)word pet peeve?