Words are a tool for effective communication. To my mind, communication is the relaying of one concept from an individual or group to another individual or group. If a message makes it from one party to another, understood and intact, communication has been successful. Unfortunately, in conversation, you get assholes who receive the communication, unpack it, understand it, then point out to the sender all the things that are wrong with it.

Person A: How is this pronunced?
Dickhead: Don’t you mean pronounced?

What has this achieved? Dickhead has made an individual or group aware of the fact that Person A mispronounced something, but he’s also conveniently informed everyone that he’s basically a complete waste of oxygen and should probably be avoided at all costs. I would urge you to do the same. If someone prefers the perfect execution of a message to the content of said message, they are probably not worth your time.

As a footnote, I am very pedantic when it comes to planned written communication. Misspelled signage, incorrect punctuation et al are a sign of laziness or unjustifiably high self esteem (I know I’m right, I don’t need to look it up). Short, observational blog posts do not count as planned communication, so if you’ve spotted a mistake, I’m not a hypocrite and your observation of my hypocrisy is moot. Ha.

It’s fun to purposefully mislead people; luckily, conversation is a great vessel for this.

As well as xkcd’s awesome example, I like to say “speaking of [something]” as a precursor to a topic, when said topic has never even so much as been alluded to. It’s best to do with confrontational people—you then get to try and convince them that you had definitely mentioned it and they probably weren’t listening.

Sometimes boredom is a dangerous thing.

The thing that probably annoys me most about the internet and forum-dwelling is grammar Nazism. The funny thing about it is that in the eventuality that you lapse concentration and use the wrong “there” or “your”, you get jumped on by people who don’t even contain the mental capacity or historical knowledge to be language purists—they’re just irritating pedants who found something popular and easy to remember to pick up on.
…