Peeves

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©1996-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind Products

I don’t have pet peeves; I have whole kennels of irritation.
~ Whoopi Goldberg (born: 1955-11-13 age: 56)

Pet Peeves

1. Ardent Christians

   Other than people who kill, torture and maim children, the people I find most repulsive are ardent Christians. Everything about the religion is revolting. To start, its bible is almost completely false. It is a giant multi-generational con, where charlatans bilk money out of the poor, ignorant and gullible with kitschy magic trinkets and hollow promises. It teaches intolerance and willful ignorance as virtues. It is an institution whose primary purpose is physical, sexual and mental child abuse. It a celebration of stupidity. Then there is the irrational homophobia and the persecution of gays. Even its music is treacle (except classical and black gospel). This goes well beyond a peeve. It is white hot fury. I would like Christianity to vanish from the face of the earth. People should be kind to each other, not just pretend to be one day of the year. Christianity is like tobacco, filthy but addictive. It exploits every human failing.

2. spammers

   including email and newsgroup spam.

3. Sloppy pronunciation

   This was my Mom’s biggie too, so I came by it honestly. Speech is for clear communication. As English becomes the world international language, it is especially important to work toward standard pronunciation with as close a match between written and verbal forms. When people pronounce sloppily, dropping or changing letters, they are attempting to evolve the language in the opposite direction into incompatible regional dialects, with ever more complex pronunciation rules. I think one should endeavour to enunciate clearly. In particular, errors in pronunciation that make English even less than phonetic that it already grate. Shifting vowels slightly cause no problem, but dropping letters or collapsing two letters onto the same sound does. Some of the common errors that set my teeth on edge include:
   • axe-i-denl instead of accidental.
   • ay-yend, two syllables, instead of and.
   • bawdle instead of bottle.
   • air-ee-ahhhs´ instead of air´-ee-as for areas and other valley girl isms — extending a vowel and trailing off the pitch part way through, especially grown women affecting the accent, and even worse professional announcers pretending to be ditzy preteens. My ears bleed when I hear that affectation, especially when males do it.
   • berry for bury and vice versa.
   • die’-ya instead of day
   • Keneda instead of Canada
   • kewpon instead of koopon for coupon.
   • koent instead of coudint for couldn’t.
   • dennis instead of dentist.
   • dint instead of didn’t.
   • doo-rable instead of dyurable for durable.
   • expirimint instead of experiment.
   • Febuary instead of February. Even professional announcers like Jim Lehrer blow this one.
   • femily instead of family.
   • feud instead of food.
   • fordy instead of forty.
   • git instead of get.
   • heighth instead of height.
   • ar-je like the French je, instead of hours.
   • eeif instead of if.
   • eye´-rack instead of ee-rack´ for Iraq.
   • insurance instead of insurance.
   • key-yids instead of kids.
   • lil instead of little.
   • lawndrymat instead of lawndro-mat for laundromat.
   • lookin instead of looking, and all ing words.
   • lugzury instead of lucksury for luxury.
   • mah instead of my.
   • meer instead of mirror.
   • miltry instead of military
   • new´-kew-lur instead of new´-klee-are for nuclear. Dinosaur enviro-cretins George W. Bush and ex-Alberta Premier Ralph Klein share this mispronunciation.
   • nooz instead of nyewz for news.
   • say-ull instead of sail for sale.
   • senner instead of senter for centre.
   • ser-yus-ly instead of ser-i-ous-ly.
   • ta instead of too for to. This started in Texas and is spreading everywhere. Even President Obama and Rachel Maddow do it.
   • stow-ah instead of store.
   • toadally instead of totally.
   • chooseday instead of tiuseday for Tuesday
   • wadder instead of water.
   • samwige instead of sandwich.
   • wool instead of we’ll
   • wuhnt instead of wouldn’t.
   • yers instead of yores for yours.
   • toon for tune.
   • rot for right.
   • kin for can.
   • Children’s programming that teaches incorrect grammar and pronunciation or obnoxious behaviour. Programming aimed at teens that teaches them ways to show off that are tantamount to suicide.
   • Professional announcers who make no attempt to pronounce people’s names or places correctly. That is their job — announcing. With the Internet, there is no excuse for phonetic butcherings of foreign names and places.

4. Pantene model Maria Menounos’ voice

   It makes my ears bleed. It is the audio equivalent of gum chewing with your mouth open. She is beautiful to look at but excruciating to listen to.

5. Reality TV

   These are boring, cheaply made and taking over. I mean shows like Celebrity Dumpster Diving, Closeout Shoe Sale, The Biggest Garage Sale In The World, World’s Filthiest Bathroom, Let’s Paint That Fence, Trash Talk Yo Mamma, Bimbo Pyjama Party, Competitive Lawn Mowing, Christian Drug Dealer, Tail that Whore, Breaking Stuff, Blowing Stuff Up, Killing Things, Tupperware Party, Let’s Bully Some Poor Blacks…

6. Dodge Truck voice

   The Dodge truck announcer sounds as if he has a cold. He sounds like a little boy trying to sound big and tough by running his voice through a frequency shifter. He reeks inauthenticity.

7. Nutrisystem spokesperson Marie Osmond’s voice

   could be used to pulverise concrete. She goes out of her way to butcher the pronunciation of nearly every word.

8. Commercials

   I detect nearly all commercials. There are a few exceptions such as the brilliant, original delights from J.G. Wentworth, Geiko and Hyundai Sonata. The problem is primarily the lies, general phoniness, non-sequiturs and deception. The mindless repetitive proto-music drives me nuts. The deliberate mangling of grammar and pronunciation tempts me to go postal. The actors behave in ways that would tempt murder with their grossness, mindless fretting and petty concerns if we encountered each other in person. Commercials for lipstick, hair dye and cosmetics are extremely obnoxious because the models mindlessly screech, primp, flounce and sneer contemptuously, as if to say “I’m beautiful and your’e not.” I can’t stand the women with those pneumatic collagen lips that look like a twitching haemhorroidal anus. Truck commercials are even more obnoxious with the implication that trashing the environment in a truck proves how much testosterone you have. They are so silly like little boys playing tough by faking deep voices.

9. The growling accent

   Affected by young women in commercial such as Dr. Scholl’s flats and Serta iComfort mattresses. A variant is the raspy throat cancer accent, which, I think is supposed to be perceived as sexy.

10. The manic loon

    airhead who shrieks in Clairol Nice ’n Easy commercials.

11. The mud lady

    airhead conceited bitch in the Swiffer commercials. I have many a time fantasised her untimely end.

12. Depictions of women

    especially in commercials. They are almost always depicted as stupid, or pretending to be stupid, obsessed with trivia, with a moth-like attraction for shoes and clothes. I could not stand to be alone in room with such a person. Why do straight males find these idiotic mannequins appealing?

13. Room mate

    My biggest peeve with my roommate is repackaging partly used comestibles in small unlabeled containers squirreled away randomly somewhere in the kitchen wherever there is room.

14. Grammatical errors

    Some of the common errors that grate include:
    • if I was Prime Minister instead of if I were Prime Minister.
    • I seen the dog instead of I saw the dog.

15. Baby talk

    between strangers, e.g. i wanna and gimme. I have no problem with it between lovers who create a bond with special pair-only vocabulary. I cringe every time I see that word wanna in the newsgroups. The police once sent me a man who was molesting his 10 year old son to see if I could talk him out of it. No matter what I said, he just whined, “but I wanna”. He had the emotional age of a 4 year old. Katy Perry affects an infantile idiot way of speaking as do perhaps 10% of women under 30.

16. TextSpeak

    when not cell phone texting.

17. Ambiguity Denial

    When I write to an author, perhaps of a computer program, explaining that some of his wording is ambiguous and his hence confusing, with suggested clear wording, 90% of the time they write back and tell me what they intended, (which I already figured out), and leave it at that. What is more upsetting is they assert that the original wording is perfectly clear (if you look at it is this light). The reader, not the writer, is the expert on what is confusing.

18. Death Denial

    The use of vocabulary than tries to pretend people don’t die, e.g. at peace, burning in hell, crossed over, crossed the bar, eternal rest, gone to another plane of existence, gone to be with Jesus, gone to heaven, gone, laid to rest, left his body, no longer with us, passed away, passed over, passed, passing, rest in peace, taken, went to meet his maker, late…

19. Christians

    especially ones who try to convince me of their crackpot ideas by claiming God spoke to them personally.

20. Christians who thank god

    when they win an athletic, talent or beauty contest, as if God were petty enough to rig these trivial contests, play favourites, and pick vain twits like them for special favour. Those that survive a tornado and thank their god for killing their neighbours but sparing them make me sick.

21. People who claim they have no personal responsibility

    for their military actions.

22. People who litter

23. Gave His Life

    People who claim a serial killer who went to the middle east to hunt and rape children “gave his life” when some parent puts a stop to his crimes. The expression only applies when you take a severe risk for a noble cause and are killed. That soldier took only minimal risk, and his cause was personal sadistic pleasure. His actions in no way protected the lives of anyone but his fellow war criminals.

24. Corporate Liars

    Corporations that tell outrageous lies even when they are caught, e.g. FOX and Shaw.

25. Car ads

    that convince people to buy overpowered, oversized cars and/or to drive dangerously.

26. Republicans

    They work for destruction of the environment, taking from the poor to give to the rich and more war. They are all criminally insane.

27. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) Syntax Errors

    websites that contain HTML syntax errors so that only Internet Explorer works with them.

28. Barney the Dinosaur

    stupefying entertainment for children that insults their intelligence and seeks to destroy their musical taste. It teaches children, male and female, to behave like airhead valley girls even before they can walk.

29. People who call hamburgers sandwiches

30. People who lard their speech with fillers

    such as like, basically, “to tell the truth”, honestly, “at the end of the day”, “move forward”, “step up to the plate”, “red in colour”, “cruel in nature”, “big in size” and “perfect storm”

31. Deliberate Misuse of Language

    Propagandists who apply the terms such as terrorist and insurgent to those they wish to tar, even when the terms don’t even remotely apply, while refusing to apply the terms to themselves, even when the definitions fit precisely.

32. Texas

    As a child I liked all things Texan, but as an adult, Texas has come to be associated with George W. Bush, his wars, bigotry toward gays, Muslims and Hispanics, the Tea Party, creationists and anti-environmentalism. Any time I hear that accent, I cringe.

33. The word devastated

    It means wasted or ravaged. It does not mean humiliated, embarrassed, irritated, or angry.

34. The word hoohah

    the battle cry of mindless bullies.

35. Politicians who say move forward

    at least once every 15 seconds.

36. The phrase one child at a time

    This is nonsense since every school, hospital, camp etc. serves multiple children at once.

37. People who use the word challenge

    to mean catastrophe.

38. People who say simplistic

    when they mean simple.

39. At the end of the day

    People who start every second sentence with at the end of the day.

40. The phrase up to

    as in guaranteed you will lose up to ten pounds. This weasel phrase sounds as if it were making a commitment, but it actually promises nothing.

41. The phrase fighting a fish

    There is no way a fish on the end of a line can harm the angler.

42. Combustion engines

    I could spit that we are still using 19th century combustion engines that waste fuel, pollute the air and make unnecessary noise. The people who really burn me up are those drive deliberately noisy, oversized or polluting cars and motorcycles, or who take powered vehicles into wilderness areas. They have the same fuck-you attitude as cigar smokers who enjoy stinking up entire city blocks just to annoy people. Another in the class are those that decorate large rocks with chewing gum.

43. Country music

    with its phony cowboys, phony accents, phony costumes, phony sentiments, phony stories and monotonously similar melodies.

44. Planned Obsolescence

    Makers of computer peripherals that stop working long before the equipment fails because they don’t update their drivers.

45. Telus

    that sells cell phones and cell phone plans that don’t let you make or receive calls. That is a bit like new selling cars that don’t actually move. You are supposed to just sit in them and press the buttons.

46. Deceptive containers

    that are only ½ full — Verbatim DVD (Digital Video Disk) s, cereal, coffee powder, Maple Leaf roasts (only about 1/5 full). Astro yogurt underfills the containers by 3 cm to try to fool you into thinking you will get more than you do. They excuse themselves by claiming what they are doing is legal, since they sell by weight. It is still a deliberate attempt to deceive. Further it is anti-environmental to use more packaging than necessary.

47. The Franklin Mint

    which is always trying to peddle medallions by tricking their customers into thinking they are legitimate currency.

48. I am humbled

    People who claim that winning an award humbled them. Losing humbles you. Winning is an ego trip.

49. junk

    TV shows about people buying, selling or burying themselves in junk.

50. Cops

    Reality TV shows about police who break into black people’s houses and abuse and bully them.

51. Cash back

    What an idiotic incentive to buy! Why bother paying money only to have some of it refunded? It just makes you pay more sales tax. For an item like a car, it just makes you borrow more money and pay interest on it. In small items the cash back is 90% of the time a fraud. No money comes back in the mail, or comes back 6 months later or they claim the offer expired, or just ignore the request. Cash back jerks you around making you send a letter with sales slips, proof of purchase etc. etc. — all manner of hassle and delay. Just lower the damn price!

52. New car dealers

    who offer free oil changes for X years, only to discover they replace your oil with oil that costs 5 times as much as the going rate, and forgoing these free changes invalidates your warranty.

53. Super market member cards

    People willing to give their name, address, phone number etc. get a card that gives them a discount on certain items. This just slows down lines as customers fish for debit and supermarket cards. It takes extra processing thus raising the prices. It makes it harder to verify the checkout receipt. Just lower the damn prices!

54. coupons

    Some inconsiderate woman will hold up the supermarket line with a fist full of coupons, each of which much be individually manually checked for expiry, conditions etc. Coupons increase prices. Just lower the damn prices!

55. Commercials

    Some commercials seem cleverly crafted to be maximally annoying such as Swiffer’s that turn mops into sex objects, Drew Barymore Cover Girl Cosmetic where she gloats, Nice N Easy Hair colour and the insane woman with fingernails on a blackboard voice, Katy Perry for Proactive, Nationwide Insurance. Commercials often accurately the depict the utter vacuuousness of modern corporate-controlled life. I also find irritating those gravelly voices that try to convince young men if they spend sufficiently on a truck no one will notice what tiny penises they have. I write the companies to no avail. Some commercials tickle me, particularly J.G. Wentworth, Geiko and sometimes Campbell’s soups.

56. No payment for two years

    This jacks up the price of the goods for everyone by the interest cost of borrowing the purchase price without repayments for two years. Nobody needs a loan like that. It is unfair to people who want to pay cash or pay off the furniture or TV in six months. I won’t buy anything from a store that offers this silliness.

57. Ad hominem addicts

    people who, in debating a point, spend 90% of their time insulting, attacking and humiliating their opponent. They have no points to defend their stance, so they try to win by intimidation.

58. You are not my mother

    People, usually conservative Christians, who imagine they have the right to act as my parents even though I am 64 years old by controlling what I should read, what movies I should attend, whom I should have sex with, what religious beliefs I should subscribe to and what I should wear. Surely I am as qualified as they to make those decisions for myself.

59. Fathers who make their children address them as Sir

    Who do they think they are? Sir Paul McCartney? a drill sergeant? Doing that bullies children into unconditional, unquestioning obedience and surrender. That sort of treatment conditions children to accept physical and sexual abuse as their natural lot. It brainwashes them to consider themselves inferior and impotent to have any effect on the world.

60. Programs that sneakily try to install unrelated programs

    as part of the install.

61. People who claim they are lucky

    when a natural disaster befalls them, but they did not die. Or those that thank god when dozens perished but they did not, as if they deserved life but the others did not.

62. American

    Politicians who use the word American at least twice in every sentence.

63. Background Music

    Commercials use maddeningly inane music in the background, usually about 5 notes, repeated over and over. Apple is even worse, pounding the same note over and over.

64. Drew Barymore

    This woman makes my skin crawl. She is spoiled, simpering, conceited, condescending, shallow, concerned with trivia. She embodies almost all the possible female vices in one body.

65. toenails

    People who display their deformed toenails in public, especially when they paint them in garish colours to draw attention to them.

66. origins

    Europe’s Best frozen berries are grown in Chile. Belgian chocolate made in Canada. Canadian bacon from Iowa. Souvenirs of Canada from China.

67. Least Favourite People

    Here are the people I wish most fervently had never been born:
    1. Dick Cheney
    2. George W. Bush
    3. The Koch Brothers
    4. Rush Limbaugh
    5. Robert Mugabe
    6. John Boehner
    7. Rick Santorum
    8. Rick Perry
    9. Michele Bachmann
    10. Glenn Beck
    11. Adolph Hitler
    12. King Henry VIII
    13. Scott Roeder
    14. Bill Vander Zalm
    15. Ronald Reagan
    16. Stephen Harper
    17. Others
    It is astounding how much misery these individuals were able to create with their blind ambition and willful stupidity.

68. Forms

    Fill in the blanks form have set data entry back to prior to the invention of the punch card. The most infuriating forms complain about some picky mechanically-correctable problem, then erase the whole form or large parts of it. Some complain and about ( - or space in phone numbers arbitrarily, either they want them on they don’t. For heaven sake, it takes only a couple of lines of code to remove them. Forms that ask for a date but give clue to the order of the year, month and day fields. There should be no need for name and address forms, only hitting a button to send a business card in standard format.

69. Uninterests

    These are not peeves, just things I have no interest in. I find it odd that others find them fascinating.
    • collecting
    • war history
    • card games
    • board games
    • video games
    • small talk
    • investing
    • fashion
    • combustion engines
    • gambling and Las Vegas in general
    • country music
    • car racing
    • fashion
    • monster trucks
    • alcohol
    • vampires, werewolves and other monsters
    • spectator sports
    • fight scenes in movies with the exception of Asian fighting
    • reality TV, especially shows about pawn shops and junk collecting. I also don’t like watching cops abusing poor black families, especially bursting in on them unannounced with cameras.

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