Pet Peeves

I hate it when my boyfriend leaves toothpaste in the sink. Instead of washing it down the drain while it's still wet, it dries up and is hard to scrub off. Drives me nuts. I also hate how he leaves his used floss on the counter.

Luckily we don't use the same bathroom (other than to shower) so I don't have to look at it too often.

I know a guy who has a peeve against pets.....any...literally.

Shaking hands!

I hate that sh!t!
There is absolutely no reason for anyone to want or need to grab someone else's hand in order to say "Hi"!
I do not like to touch or be touched by anyone other than those few (2) in my closest circle.
Maybe that's weird of me but, so what? Why is it so strange to not want to reach-out and "shake" someone's dirty, sweaty hand?
Why not grab their ear or cup the back of someone's knee or some other thoroughly strange gesture like that when you cross someone's path and tell them your name? It's just unnecessary and weird!
Yeah. I'm kinda anti-social and VERY germaphobic but, isn't that my right?
NO! If I don't grasp your palm in an overly familiar way, I'm considered the rude one.
Me? I think grabbing at a total stranger is MUCH more rude!
Personally, I feel like the traditionally obligatory manhandling and swapping of "whatever" is disgusting and archaic.
Then, you've got those insecure jackasses that honestly believe that their unnecessarily "manly" grip actually defines them and distinguishes them from you and everyone else.
What a crock of macho, ritualistic bullshit!

I'm sorry for the rant but, I HATE shaking hands!
If I feel close enough to you to touch you, I will hug you.
Otherwise, don't f*cking touch me......and don't expect me to touch you!

On the subject of toilet paper... I'd be happy if someone used the last of a roll and just left the new roll on the counter. It never works like that for me. Generally I sit down and realize there's nothing left on the roll and THEN realize the nearest roll is thru the bathroom, thru the bedroom, down the hall....

I absolutely HATE when toilets go unflushed. How freaking hard is it to push the little handle?!? I don't want to see your shit, and I don't think that's too much to ask. Biglou's ex apparantly trained the kids not to flush (for god knows what reason) and now I have to reprogram them. Besides my OCD about avoiding shit, we have two dogs that tend to drink out of the toilet when unsupervised and I'd rather not have an enormous vet bill.

If we didn't have to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom the whole entire world would be better off.

Dammit, all those biological functions! They suck.

i think the non hand washers are why i have to wash my hands after touching any door with bare hands. i know i spend too much time thinking about it but if you come out of the stall with dirty hands, and turn on the water with dirty hands (thus making it dirty) then shut off the dirty water faucet with clean hands then your hands are dirty again. and the worst kind of dirty. thats hundereds of butt wipe dirty on that faucet. but i have a system. i first do the thing for the paper towels(also dirty in my mind) so its hanging there. i then wash my hands, dry them with the towel, and then use the towel to turn off the water, then unlock and open the door with it and throw it away. i like the pa turnpike stops. they have motion activated flushing, water faucets, and paper towel dispensers. technology is good for somethings!!

anyone remember those old nasty rotationg towels that used to be in bathrooms. damn those were the worst idea ever!!!!!

and i agree about eating and sleeping. both are very enjoyable. i just wish they werent required. id love to have them as hobbies to do in my free time. i just hate that they are required.

damn i need to go to bed. if only i was tired!!!!!

Damn, those things are nasty. Why were those things ever invented??? It's not like the germs just fall off.

I hate breathing in nasty poo smells in the bathroom. Our bathroom at work has no ventilation and I don't know what the women eat here, but that sh!t is NASTY. Sometimes I hold my breath until I'm done and out the door. Sometimes I turn blue. I know that I'm breathing in someone else's poo particles and it just makes me sick.

I especially hate it when people use the bathroom and don't flush when they are in the process of going and I have to hear everything. Please flush to at least cover up the sound. I don't want to hear your farts and grunts, people. Eat more fiber dammit!

^^^^^WORD^^^^^ Could not have said it better!!!

^ That sucks. I kind of have the opposite problem. People here page/call you and don't say who they are. They assume that I recognize them all by simply the sound of their voices... bleh. And it's just bad manners to interrupt. It's not like you're bomb technicians and every nano-second counts or something...

Oh, and as an example of my little rant about users - I just had a user ask me how to print an attachment from an email. 'It has the little printer button, but I wasn't sure if that would work'... are you fvcking kidding me? Wow.

^^^^sounds a little like the calls I get from my mom

"I figuratively exploded" somehow just doesn't pack the same punch...

anyway, I found this article, it's a little boring, but it does give some history of the usage of the word literally...


The Word We Love To Hate
Literally.
By Jesse Sheidlower
When I introduce myself as a dictionary editor to a stranger, I can usually count on a few things. The stranger will say, "Oh, I'll have to watch how I talk in front of you." The stranger will ask me about why some word like bling was put into The Dictionary (as though there's only one). And then the stranger will complain about a pet usage peeve, some error perpetrated by members of a disliked group—sportscasters, say, or teenagers, or Americans.

Recently, strangers I meet seem particularly peeved by people who use literally to mean figuratively (the ones who say things like "he literally exploded with rage"). Even strangers I don't meet are fixated—two of them run a reasonably informed blog devoted to "tracking abuse of the word 'literally.' "

As is often the case, though, such "abuses" have a long and esteemed history in English. The ground was not especially sticky in Little Women when Louisa May Alcott wrote that "the land literally flowed with milk and honey," nor was Tom Sawyer turning somersaults on piles of money when Twain described him as "literally rolling in wealth," nor was Jay Gatsby shining when Fitzgerald wrote that "he literally glowed," nor were Bach and Beethoven squeezed into a fedora when Joyce wrote in Ulysses that a Mozart piece was "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat." Such examples are easily come by, even in the works of the authors we are often told to emulate.
How did literally come to mean the opposite of what it originally meant? The earliest uses of literally were "in a literal manner; word for word" ("translated literally from Greek") and "in a literal sense; exactly" ("He didn't mean that literally").

By the late 17th century, though, literally was being used as an intensifier for true statements. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Dryden and Pope for this sense; Jane Austen, in Sanditon, wrote of a stormy night that, "We had been literally rocked in our bed." In these examples, literally is used for the sake of emphasis alone.*
Eventually, though, literally began to be used to intensify statements that were themselves figurative or metaphorical. The earliest examples I know of are from the late 18th century, and though there are examples throughout the 19th century—often in prominent works; to my earlier examples could be added choice quotations from James Fenimore Cooper, Thackeray, Dickens, and Thoreau, among many others—no one seems to have objected to the usage until the early 20th century. In 1909, Ambrose Bierce included the term in Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, offering the following sentence—"His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet."—as suspect. "It is bad enough to exaggerate," he wrote, "but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable." Revered usage writer H.W. Fowler complained in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage that, "We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that ... we do not hesitate to insert the very word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate." The examples usually stigmatized are the ones in which literally modifies a cliché or a metaphoric use that is already highly figurative.

Why, though, did this usage of literally suddenly come under such fire? It is not the first, nor will it be the last, instance of a word that is used in a seemingly contradictory way. There are many such words, and they arise through various means. Called "Janus words," "contranyms," or "auto-antonyms," they include cleave ("to stick to" and "to split apart"), dust ("to remove dust from" and "to sprinkle dust upon"), moot ("able to be discussed; arguable" and "purely theoretical") and peruse and scan (each meaning both "to read closely" and "to glance at hastily; skim"). Usage writers often criticize such words as potentially confusing and usually single out one of the meanings as "wrong," the "right" meaning being the older one, or the one closer to the word's etymological meaning, or the one more frequent when 18th-century grammarians began to examine language systematically. It's not always possible to predict when something will be condemned: While the "skim" sense of peruse is often criticized, the "skim" sense of scan—the main current sense—is rarely noticed, even though it's a recent development, quite different from the meaning the word had for centuries.

In the case of literally, the "right" meaning is said to be "exactly as described; in a literal way," because that's what the base word literal is supposed to mean. In fact, the literal meaning of literal would be something like "according to the letter," but it's almost never used this way. "He copied the manuscript literally" would be one possible example. So when we use literally to refer to something other than individual letters—to whole words, or to thoughts in general—we are already walking down the figurative path, and if we end up with people eating curry so hot that their mouths are "literally on fire," how surprised can we be?

The trouble with usage criticism of the sort leveled at literally is that it's typically uneven: Parallel uses are frequent and usually pass unnoticed. For every peruse there's a scan (see my essays on these terms here and here); for every hopefully there's a clearly; and for every literally there's a really: Or did you expect people to complain when really is used to emphasize things that are not "real"? When Meg, in Little Women, moaned that "It's been such a dismal day I'm really dying for some amusement," she wasn't the one dying.

The one sensible criticism that can be made about the intensive use of literally is that it can often lead to confusing or silly-sounding results. In this case, the answer is simple: Don't write silly-soundingly. Some usage books even bother to make this point about literally. Then again, most usage advice could be reduced to one simple instruction: "Be clear." But that would be the end of a publishing category.

How about people that think they are the only ones on the Earth worth giving a sh** about? I was pulling out of a parking space and some woman started chatting up her friend in back of me with her kids all hanging out of the car next to me...

well, I know when I see someone get in the car, start it, and put it in reverse that it would be good to effing MOVE....Damn, I almost lost it. I gave the biggest bite my ass look to both. Probably oblivious.

Also, when people pull up to a bank window and dont have their stuff done. Common courtesy? Some people are truly in their own little tiny world. Grrr

I hate it when people cross busy streets at the crosswalk when it says Don't Walk. It's going to change in about 30 seconds. Can they really not wait that long? Or worse, when people cross through the cars about 5 feet away from the crosswalk! (I almost hit a guy who was doing that yesterday).

Also, we have a snack system at our office where they keep the kitchen pretty well stocked, and you can take things and pay for them (either as you get them or you can let them accumulate and pay periodically). Anyway, they always get the big cases of canned sodas and put them in the refrigerator in small groups, and, although the Diet Cokes seem to be the most popular of the sodas, nobody ever restocks them when they take the last one.

I know this is awful, but I hate overly nice people.

I have a coworker who feels as though he's the Welcome Wagon. He befirends all new people, tries to get us all together for group lunches monthly, buys gifts like saltwater taffy and weird crappy water bottles from Wal mart and ugly Christmas ornaments and will stop by my cube like daily to say hi and ask how my previous day. Dude, leave me alone. Be nice to someone else. i will be pleasant, but I don't want your trinkets, I don't want you to bother me when i am in a zone, I don't want forwards about guardian angels and answered prayers, and I don't want a cookie. i already said no 2X, please do not make me get belligerent about a cookie.

I have an old friend who is very great, but recently has converted to being a Mormom and now each time I get off the phone with her she tells me she loves me, when i see her she hugs me as though she'll never see me again, and she leaves weird messages about praying for me and loving me and my husband "so terribly so."

I don't like that much affection, not even from my spouse. it weirds me out. Kinda goes with the earlier peeve about strange girls hugging you. I feel guilty when people shower me with this kind of obvious affection. I love my friends, but I am not going to leave them answering machine messages about it. I figure they know... I hold their hair when they puke, I help them move, I bring them BEN & Jerry's when their boyfriend is a jerk, I loan them my favorite heels for a night out on the town, I burn them CDs of new music to experience and IM with them all day. Isn't that enough proof of love? I don't want a kiss on the cheek from anyone but my husband, my dog and my 75-year old aunt.