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News reporters who misuse words. Their tool is language, they ought to learn how to use it correctly.
I have lots of examples in French I hear all the time, but translate poorly. But one that'll work fine to illustrate is the abuse of the word "literally". I still vividly remember a report, from years ago, about some minister who got angry while parliament was in session and went on a tirade, and we, the viewers, were told he "literally exploded".
No.
No, he didn't. It would've been a very different story had that been the case.
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dandy72 wrote: some minister who got angry while parliament was in session and went on a tirade, and we, the viewers, were told he "literally exploded".
World could be a better place if some ministers "literally exploded" 
Mircea
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i happen to have gotten a hole in one on that windmill and a nifty little plastic trophy for which i was most proud .
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kmoorevs wrote: 2: misuse/overuse of the words 'like' and 'literally'
I have a list of words, or rather two: One in English, one in Norwegian, of words of that kind. Before I present a document to anyone, I make a global search for each and every one of those words, throughout the text. Some times they are appropriate, but most of them can be removed / rewritten.
I guess that my most frequent to-be-removed-or-rewritten in English is 'but', 'however' and 'will', as well as passive voice. I also tend to, on the initial writing, string together sentences with 'and' and a couple others. So I search for ', and'. Usually I chop them into two shorter sentences. I guess that on the average, the average length of the sentences I publish is 50-70% of what I did in the very first writing.
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Steve Raw wrote: Whenever I think of miniature golf
It is great time waster for younger kids.
Not to mention a really safe event for date night for kids of a slightly older age.
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Computer book authors, and their editors.
In the old days of typewriters, the authors were using words sparingly, writing what is necessary, and leaving the rest out. Today, books are so wordy, crammed with the author's personal opinions and excitement, repetitions upon repetitions, and a lot of stuff of minimal interest to the reader. I have several books where, every time I open them, I am itching to grab a black felt tip pen and strike out completely unnecessary sentences, and a plain pen to circle sentences and draw an error: This belongs in that paragraph (or chapter), not here.
There are the authors taking from granted that you are experienced in some other field, such as an earlier, now outdated / replaced technology, explaining the current technology mainly in terms of the old one.
Related: When you publish a revised 2023 edition of a book, you should also make sure to remove excited ovations about the new technology introduced in 2007. Make sure to update the references to specific versions of tools, libraries, standards etc. so that the discussions and examples are not outdated by several versions, and you have to go to an internet search to see what is still valid of that old stuff.
There are those authors who cannot limit themselves to the topic of the book, maybe because they have been lecturing to students who had not yet completed that other course. Like that book I bought to get to know the peculiarities of GPUs, and there is a lengthy chapter discussing the very basic concepts of binary semaphores.
Often, when a book treats a small handful of distinctly different technologies in separate chapters or sections, you cannot just read the introductory chapters and then skip to the section of the technology you want to learn: The examples, evaluations and explanations are built directly on top of the previous chapters; you must study them all to understand the explanations of 'your' technology. This if frequently the case even within one base technology: Examples are far from free standing; you must have studied them (and sometimes tried to solve the exercises) of all earlier chapters to understand the example to illustrate the solution to your problem.
Essentially, the books are like a professor's lecture notes: His students do not have a problem to solve, they have a set of topics that they are to learn, one after the other. They do work through the chapters and all the exercises, one by one. College textbooks are fine at a college, but if you publish for an audiences outside the college, but for a professional audience, you should do it differently, especially in the editing.
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The stoopid "Wordle" posts here in the lounge...
Congratulations you solved a daily word problem - you better post it for all your online "friends" to see! 
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Drivers who merge early when a lane is closed - it is actually a road rule to merge as late as possible in Oz. But when you calmly pass all the idjits that have merged out of the closing lane to merge just before the lane closes they get pissed off and some even try and stop you from merging late.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Same problem in Canada. If you merge at the last minute, people act as if you're butting into line (barging into the queue). But it's been proven that a "zipper merge", where all lanes are used until no longer possible, is the most efficient.
On a related note, some years ago I noticed a significant correlation between lousy drivers and cars that have crap hanging from the rear-view mirror. Little scented pine trees, rosary beads, fuzzy dice, dreamcatchers...localize it with the nonsense popular in your part of the world. It's practically a dead giveaway.
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My peeve is the constant promotion of zipper merge. It depends entirely on all the drivers being courteous.
From my years of commuting in Michigan with almost-constant construction and road repair, I can tell you this would take some universe-bending magic.
The other is construction of roundabouts where there's an unending line of traffic from one direction- a shift change or parents dropping off and picking up their kiddos from school. If you're on the downstream leg of the intersection, you can get trapped in a mile-long line of unmoving cars.
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I share most of the ones mentioned later in this thread, but one not mentioned yet that really gets my goat:
When somebody of note dies (eg Nelson Mandela) the media (esp. rolling news TV) will not only ignore anything else happening around the world, no matter how important (esp. to those involved), but will spend all its time finding people to interview to ask either for their reminiscences about the person concerned - whether they knew them or not! - or their thoughts about what other people who might have known that person are feeling about other people who might have known that person are feeling. (Recursion: see Recursion.)
Surprisingly, this didn't happen as much as I expected when Prince Philip and The Queen died, possibly because there is both more respect for them and there was also plenty of other stuff associated with their deaths to cover.
For Mandela though, we ended up with the rediculous situation of someone who had never met or known him asking another perosn who might just possibly have glanced at a photo of Mandela on a newspaper page once many years ago (perhaps whilst looking over the shoulder of a commuter on the Tube) being asked what Mandela's family were feeling at the moment etc. (Repeat endlessly until something more newsworthy comes along, like the presenter dropping their pencil etc.)
This carrries on still in a minor way, with long, insensitive interviews with people who have suffered some tradegy, not with the aim of improving the victim's lot, but because it makes for 'good' emotional TV and hence draws in the rubber-neckers to increase viewing figures. (Think of the coverage of that poor woman with mental health issues who drowned recently.)
...
AND another thing!
This trope (adopted by just about every media co now) of sending someone to stand outside a building (often in the dark/and or rain etc) with a TV crew to tell you something that the studio presenter could easily report, or which that same reporter could have said in the studio. I'm not talking about on-the-ground live-coverage/breaking news stuff here (eg reports from Kyiv etc), but when there is - for example - a ministerial or business statement. Some poor reporter and team is sent to relate the contents from outside a closed office building, or No 10 with only Larry the Cat and the policeman for company. Such a waste of time and money.
---
Sorry, I'll get me coat...
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One of the most ridiculous examples of this was after an airliner crashed and sunk in the ocean. A news channel was showing an image of water- probably a local river or pool in front of their building from the size of the waves.
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While it doesn't drive me up the wall to quite the same degree as your hatred for miniature golf does I do have a huge annoyance with A.D./B.C. and have had it since I learnt what they stood for.
"Anno Domini" is a neat sounding phrase in latin. Few may mean what it actually stands for, "in the year of our lord", but most everyone know it signifies year >0. On the other hand "before Christ" is just plain English.
Why mix languages? Latin does have the term A.C., "ante Christum", to mirror A.D. but it doesn't see any use and there's no English "after Christ" term that's ever seen use as far as I know.
This weird mishmash of languages is stupid and I hate it.
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The modern usage is CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before Common Era) with CS starting at the same point as AD did.
It's been in limited use since the 17th Century, but is gaining traction in the modern Woke / Inclusive society we are (slowly) transitioning to: The Origin & History of the BCE/CE Dating System - World History Encyclopedia[^]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Does CE/BCE recognize the number zero? Or does 1 follow immediately after -1 on the number line?
As far as I can see from easily accessible sources, it appears as if the 'pagan' CE/BCE notation still does not recognize zero. So it is nothing but a relabeling of the Christian, religion based, calendar - not, as Wikipedia claims, "BCE and CE are religiously neutral terms".
Astronomers are scientists. They seem to be able to cope with the number 0: Astronomical year numbering[^]. If we are to replace AC/DC with anything non-religious, this would be a far better choice (considering that Unix epoch doesn't span the entire time range that we want to cover  )
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trønderen wrote: If we are to replace AC/DC with anything
In the beginning ... 
A much better system.
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In the beginning there was the Big Bang. After 10E-33 seconds were the Age of Inflation. And so on.
And so on. I guess that we should shift to a coarser time scale if we want to get through it before the Gnab Gib.
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Of course, according to the AC/DC time scale "In the beginning" was in 1955.
Because man didn't know about a rock'n'roll show.
And all that jive.
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"Year zero" doesn't exist in CE/BCE - it follows the numbering convention of BC/AD exactly because that is common usage, and way too much confusion would result if you had to change "2023" to "2022" to fit in a year zero! And if it change the BCE numbers, that would cause confusion as well because all the textbooks would be a digit out as well.
Personally, I'd adopt the Federation Stardate system (if I understood it, which I don't) 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: if you had to change "2023" to "2022" to fit in a year zero
Astronomers never suggested that. They treat 1 BC as year 0 by their scale, and BC 4, say, as their year 3.
Very few of our everyday time stamps refer to years BC with single-year precision, and are unaffected by the adjustment of n BC being adjusted to n-1 BC. There are not very many textbooks making exact time references 2000 years back in time. Probably the most significant ones are those contradicting the religious scriptures, e.g. pointing out that Herod died 4 BC - it doesn't matter if we call that year -3 - they don't fit the Jesus myths anyway.
On the other side of the line: Quirinius became a Legate of Syria AD 6, but that was before Jesus was born. So Jesus was born both (at least) 4 year BC (or year -3), but also at least 6 years into the AD era. I know that this does not affect believers, but to me it just strengthens the idea that the birth of one specific religious preacher should not control our calendar, especially when it provably couldn't have had happened the suggested time.
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Imagine the outcry if there was a push to change the date system to something from another religion.
I like the Japanese system of counting an era with the new Emperor. Fans talk about Showa-era Godzilla movies, or Heisei Super-Sentai. I want to see a Sengoku Mothra movie, or Meiji Kamen Rider. 
Oddly, nobody seems to date anime or manga after the era.
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Lately, some morning news shows are turning into the Home Shopping Network toward the end of the show. And the hosts, who are usually very experienced news anchors, have to feign wonder and interest in all the 'fantastic' products - which are all 1/2 off!!
Incredibly annoying!
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bonus eyeroll for using them both in the same sentence. 
