Pet hates are things that certain people find really irritating. Usually people have more than one pet hate, and usually they're little, petty, insignificant things that people shouldn't worry about but do. You could use these pet hates to deliberately annoy people, but there are other ways which might work better.
My pet hates revolve mostly around the use of the apostrophe. I get FURIOUS when I see signs in greengrocers marked "Apple's", for example, and even MORE annoyed when I see it down in print.
One of my grandmother's pet hates was the phrase "I'll ring you up later". She couldn't understand why people used the word "up". And, thinking about it, nor can I. But it used to really annoy her, and she was a code-breaker in the war, so she wasn't stupid.
Share your pet hate with the world...
Click the discuss button next to this entry and let us know. Yours might be almost as silly and insignificant as mine. Go on. We won't laugh. So far, your intrepid researcher has spotted a trend:
Things that probably don't set out to be particularly annoying
The Microsoft Office pop-up paperclip (hammythamster Á)Angel has a pet hate, among other things, about "a certain person in our year who looks like a barbie doll and is intelligent and grrrrrrrrrrr"... no jealousy at all here, then... :)Tweetie hates flipper DVDs.Ormondroyd speaks total sense when he says he hates automated telephone systems. "Press 1 if you want this, press 2 if you want that" and so on. Oh, yes.Peregrin hates low-fat foods - more specifically, food which says "75% fat free" which, of course, actually means "25% SOLID FAT!"Other peoples' grasp of language and grammar
Language and grammar really is a hot potato when it comes to pet hates. Just look at all this:
Pronouncing words lazily - eg 'Tempeture' (Tem-Pah-Chure) instead of 'Temperature' (Tem-Prah-Chure) (so says vandervecken, kicking off a conversation about these kinds of people).Not getting apostrophes right (james007) - but then, you knew that by now. There's a great article about it, which I didn't write, just here."My pet hate is the misuse of the word 'hate'", says melbourne mark rather pedantically.Tweetie writes that his/her pet hates include "Anyone who is gramatically incorrect. Ever." Other pet hates of Tweetie's... "Dale Winton" (oh, he's just harmless) and "The celebration of stupendously dim but pretty people as gods".Laurel (or perhaps "Lorrel", or "Laural", or "Laurell") has a pet hate about "people who try to make their kids names exotic by screwing up the spelling of an ordinary name, i.e. Phara (Farrah), Kharyn (Karen), Kaitlynn (Caitlyn), Kristeen, Jayne, and Rebekkah. Sometimes they manage to make it completely unrecognizable, which means their kids' names are constantly mispronounced as well as misspelled."Engels42 includes "people that constantly misspell the same word, over and over again, even after they're told so.", while CrazyOne agrees, saying "I'd say mispronouncing the same words over again after they're told about it goes right in there with the spelling."How people type: People who use Internet phrases like "i'll c u!" and "cuz u told me 2", pEOpLE wHo FiND iT FunNy To MiX caPS AnD LoWEr caSe, people who type without using the caps key at all, and people who always type with caps lock full on (St Ioreth, Saint The Cheese of Long Lunches and Dinsdale Pirahna)Highly over-used phrases
"At the end of the day...""Cheer up, it might never happen"."Give me some time to think about it""I'll be with you in one second". It never is."I'll call you back""I'm from the government, and I'm here to help""It's your holiday. You should be working.""LOL!""Smile!this is "cute" or "quaint"...
From Ormondroyd, Tweetie, Angel, Clynchy, The Cheese, , Bruce, Duncan Jones (Spearcarrier))
What we do
Included in Fate Amenable to Change's pet hate entry is "knowing about 2 seconds before you actually do it that you are about to knock over / drop that precariously balanced object of importance."What other people do
People who forward everything they think is funny to everyone else via e-mail. And people who don't refill an empty printer.(Duncan Jones (Spearcarrier))People who hang the Union Jack upside down (Gedge)People who claim the millennium started in 2000 (John)People who don't like people who claim the millenium started in 2000 (Scarlet)People that get in the way in crowded shopping centres (John)People that say something's right because “The majority of people believes it, so just let it go”. (Sir Bedvedere, who then goes on to list some of the consequences)People who drive at 40mph whether the speed limit is 60mph or 30mph (Sir Bedvedere)Share yours... hit the "Discuss" button...
