(no subject)

[schmerica]

First. I've been reading the Angel recaps at TWoP, because I haven't seen any the episodes this season, except one at home during break with my faithful watching sister. ("Wait, so why is it raining fire? Andwho is having sex there? Eeeeew. He's watching?") Anyway, so the recaps have this really annoying, persisting error of substituting the word "discrete" for "discreet." Which you may not know, but is one of my few irrational "Grrr! Evil bad die!" word/grammer/spelling triggers. Linguistics and descriptivism got rid of a lot of them, but some of them are bound in there. (Oddly, judgment is another, milder one -- the problem there is that my oh-so-annoying "judgement" actually is an accepted form. So I have absolutely no rationale there.)

Anyway, so. Discrete. Annoying. Especially when they have their stupid grammar annoyances in the same paragraph. Especially the combination of discrete and their grammar annoyance being an annoyance that annoys me. Namely: whining about the phrase "could care less."

I have never understood why people have such problems with this phrase. Like, dude! You know it means, they know what it means, people use it all the time. It's a valid idiom! Do you have this amount of trouble with all non-literal speech? Presumably you get through a day chock full of sarcasm, irony and metaphor, so I really don't see why this one example makes you get all bitchy.

Anyway. I thought I should share that.

On another note: BBC one hundred books list -- the ones I've read are in bold.

1984, George Orwell
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
Dune, Frank Herbert
Emma, Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Holes, Louis Sachar
I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Katherine, Anya Seton
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
Magician, Raymond E Feist
The Magus, John Fowles
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Mort, Terry Pratchett
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
Perfume, Patrick Süskind
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
The Ragged Trousered Philantrhopists, Robert Tressell
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
The Stand, Stephen King
The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Tess Of The D'urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Twits, Roald Dahl
Ulysses, James Joyce
Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Wind In The Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

Which gives me 46/100, I think. Although I think Goodnight Mr. Tom might have the book my sixth grade teacher spent the year reading aloud to us; I wouldn't swear on it, though. Nor can I ever remember whether I actually read A Christmas Carol. I've started Great Expectations like five times; I keep thinking I've read Middlemarch, oddly enough, when I don't think I've ever even picked it up; I didn't read Colour of Magic because I found the first couple of books in Discworld to be really not very good (it's possibly my favorite series of books ever, but he really doesn't find his place till about Pyramids); and I've never heard of quite a few of these. I am in with the people wondering who Jacqueline Wilson is, and why she has four books here.

Comments

[runpunkrun]

I also hate when they complain about "could care less."

And can I just add how annoying it is to have the TWoP recappers transcribe dialogue and then add "[sic]" after every grammar and usage irregularity in order to point out their superiority so that we don't mistakenly think they somehow actually WROTE that dialogue and just got all the words wrong?

Um. I too suffer from language snobbery, yet many TWoP recappers make me look cool and collected in the face of grammar adversity.

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Heh. The "[sic]"s are necessary to keep those people and their foul foul grammar from tainting them! Eeew.

The Angel recaps also seem to like to stick in "[that]"s in the middle of sentences where it's absent. Even though it's not really necessary in English. Like, "She told me [that] you were coming." Very strange.

[claire.livejournal.com]

"could care less" irritates the shit out of me - because no-one uses it in Australia, we all say "couldn't care less".

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Do you have that problem with most American regional speech?

It must be very convenient for the things that really annoy you to be things you never hear.

[elynross.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid this is going to sound harsh, but really, it's just a matter of clashing preferences. *g*

My problem is that the idiom, in its original form, was "I couldn't care less," which actually means "I care as little as I possibly could," but the malformed "I could care less," which implies that you could reduce how much you care, has crept in insidiously, as people use it without thinking about meaning. Which is the problem I have with it -- it means exactly the opposite of what people are trying to say. Yeah, it seems to have become colloquially accepted, and English is a growing, evolving language -- but it too often strikes me as another proof that too many people don't really pay attention to what they're actually saying. Works for you, drives me crazy, even though usually I'm all for, "if we all understand what's meant, then it's communicating."

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

Which is the problem I have with it -- it means exactly the opposite of what people are trying to say.

Well, except as you said, it doesn't, anymore.

Ah, well. I don't quite get where you're coming from, but different strokes, I suppose. We can sit here and have nice contrasting crankiness.

Re:

[claire.livejournal.com]

Trust me, I'm a cranky old bitch - there are a heck of a lot of things that annoy me, but I only "hear" "could care less" on the internet. And only over the last couple of years. The first few times I saw it I was convinced it was a typo because it didn't make sense. And I'm getting used to "American" - at least what I hear on TV. Not sure about American regional speech - but I don't actually understand a lot of it.

[linabean.livejournal.com]

See, I even think most people have a good sense of what the intent of the idiom "I could care less" is, because I always hear people say it in a sarcastic tone of voice. The way they say, "I could care less" sounds the same as when they retort, "Oh, like I care," which literally mean the same thing, but, in that tone, both mean the same thing as their liteal opposite "I couldn't care less." And "I could care less" and "like I care" have the added advantage of extra rudeness through sarcasm. (Well, that's only an advantage when you're *trying* to be rude, but most people, when they brusquely tell someone they don't care about them or what they're saying, are trying to be rude.)

The discreet/discrete thing reminds me of a very dorky pun that was on a Comedy Central cartoon I loved, called Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist. The character Dr. Katz had quite a dorky sense of humor, and he told the joke, "Did you hear? Mathematician figured out that parallel lines *can* meet. ...They just have to be discrete."

Horrible, isn't it? That's why I like it.