Things that make you cringe

makes me cringe when people make a big deal out of grammar, genuinely

being judgemental about spelling, grammar and syntax is inextricable from classism, ableism, racism, xenophobia (general Anglophone-centric white supremacist structures), even if there is no such knowing intent behind the judgement

you should rethink your stance on this

(will make exceptions for judging bad syntax if it’s being used by people who think a lot of themselves + their own opinion - say, people who write into/comment on the websites of nasty newspapers)

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it’s good when local versions of colonist languages infiltrate the colonists’ country and mutate the slang

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I think this usage is fine. It’s when people say shit like “reach out to John and myself with any questions.”

Whilst i agree with everything you’ve said, i don’t think you can really ask for @jeromium to ‘rethink’ cos this is a thread about cringing.

Cringing is an instinct based knee jerk response. Being a dick about it is very different.

I cringe all the time when i see apostrophe misuse, i can’t help it but (unless you’re in my year 10 and it’s my job to help you correct your work) I’m not going to storm up to the market stall and have a go about their apostrophes.

Can’t blame people for what makes them cringe, only whether they choose to act on it.

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Oh and while we’re on language things… people in the UK using ‘sophmore’ to describe a second record makes me cringe my insides out.

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I still question the use of ‘cringe’ here? Like I say, cringing when you see grammar/spelling stuff in large popular/costly publications makes sense since this is a big embarrassment (for that publication or whatever).

But like a Tweet or whatever by someone random isn’t really that. Yeah, it frustrates me when I see misused stuff like that (and then I get grumpy at myself for still caring about something that’s really a tool of class/racial oppression in so many ways but that’s a separate thing) but I don’t cringe.

But the reason for it making you cringe is only knee jerk based on learned behaviour that can be undone with more consideration of the reasons why it might be wrong.

It’s easy to assume everyone has the same level of education, privelege or forget that people might have neurodiversities or learning differences.

I was a grammar pedant in my 20s and honestly now i couldn’t give AF (though as a sometime copywriter my posts are riddled with nonsense, doesn’t mean i dont get things right professionally but day to day i genuinely find it hard and exhausting to spot my mistakes or care enough to correct them).

Also so many errors i know i make are down to my absolute renegade of a phone keyboard/autocorrect that i sometimes retype over and over and at the end of the word it changes back again to having the wrong spelling or an apostrophe i dont want and i want to throw my phone at the wall multiple times a day so I can only imagine how older generations might feel if it happens to them).

Also think we need to be more accepting than ever now long covid has had such an inpact on so many and confusion and forgetfulness has become much more common.

Appreciate your point but knee jerk to me is a gag reflex, a shudder at nails down a board, not cringing at something that at the crux of it is judgemental behaviour.

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(Corrected a few mistakes there but going to leave those missing apostrophes and that rogue open bracket there as representation of all us bad typers :sweat_smile:

)

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Ooh this is my favourite but a step further - signing or humming along to a song they’ve never even heard before. My GF does this all the time and it brings my piss to a boil

OH NO SOMEBODY USED A COMMA INSTEAD OF A SEMI COLON AND NOW MY LIFE IS EXACTLY THE SAME AS IT WAS BEFORE WHAT ON EARTH AM I TO DO!

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huge agree

(but - and I’m so sorry!! - you wanna be saying ‘neurodivergences’ :slightly_smiling_face: :nerd_face:)

((I think?? maybe ‘-divergencies’ - just googled because I’m not sure :upside_down_face::upside_down_face::upside_down_face::upside_down_face:))

(((sorry!!!)))

^^^

actually I dunno. just saw someone corrected on it recently and was worried I’d been saying it wrong, but it might be interchangeable

Cringe ≠ annoyed or angry

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i really struggle with -verse and -vergent and cant get it right even when i look it up and is a massive annoying and debilitating part of my adhd issues (being incapable of remembering the “right” way to say something) hence why you’ll always see me use impact never effect/affect as my brain just can’t do it and it stops me posting so many things because my self esteem about it is so low. Thanks for correcting me but would appreciate it being let slide given the context.

no I know, I was only saying because I was scared I’d gotten it wrong because of the same reason recently!!

The miming whilst making eye contact element is my worst one. It was the go-to for both of my sisters to wind me up as a kid and now it’s basically the main thing that people do.

Same. I was confident i was getting it right then i got it wrong and now i cant make sense of it as i spin out over it. Not just this term, anything similar to this. Sometimes wonder if that’s maybe something like dyslexia rather than adhd? Not sure but even reading definitions of things doesnt make things clearer to me as i find processing meanings super tricky for some reason.

I find it a huge headache trying to articulate more technical stuff, which is frustrating

like I tried to tell off some antivax protesters last year and my brain shut down on me. normally spend ages trying to type stuff out, and even then it gets tangled again pretty quickly

also not sure exactly what combination of things makes it so hard for me either

but yes, only did the initial reply out of a sort of frightened empathy :see_no_evil:

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(a good working example of why grammar etc isn’t anywhere near as important as good faith, empathy, humility, patience)

(trying to communicate is frightening + complicated)

(I am always frightened anyway…)

There are definitely occasions where it’s not obvious (like if someone says “It was so funny I literally pissed myself” - I mean, I want to know if that’s true or not) but in general yeah the context is pretty clear.

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Yep - ‘literally’ is used in those instances as a point of exclamation/meta-simile innit

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