superpeeve Oh my Gawd! - Totally unOfficial Pet Peeve Thread.

[Rowan Amore]

24 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

While we're discussing misnomers...

Am I the only one who never eats in her dining room?

That's where I wrap gifts.

Growing up, I had no idea that people actually had a specific room for dining.  We had a kitchen and a kitchen table just like my grandmother had.  I also had no concept of what a 'family' room/den was.  We had one room with one tv we called the living room. 

The only time we use the dining room is for big family dinners/holidays/birthdays.   

 

[Orwar]

   We use both 'toalett' and 'badrum' in Swedish, too. Fairly interchangeably as, unlike the Brits, we don't really separate the two. But we also were quite late with adopting them, by 1930 only 1/5 homes had indoor plumbing, and as late as the 1970's it wasn't uncommon for homes to not have such facilities. And in rural areas, it's still quite common to have an outhouse instead, and rather than pushing for all homes to have indoor water closets, we've gone a long way to modernise the outhouses - I've been to some with heated floors and all! .. As well as ones that were little more than drafty sheds with an old phone book and a bucket of slaked lime.

[Kiera Clutterbuck]

11 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

1 hour ago, Kiera Clutterbuck said:

I like honesty and directness myself, but there is a point at which this turns into crudity. I mean nobody really wants another to tell them exactly what they're going to do when they leave the dinner table.

Do you really think that others don't know what you are up to when you don't use the word toilet when you leave the dinner table?

BTW In The Netherlands it is the formal expression to use the word toilet or toiletten in plural.
Nobody will get a red head when you ask a waiter or the bartender where the toiletten are in a restaurant.

I always assume they know I'm taking a leisurely after-dinner walk to aid my digestion and improve the sluggish mentality which digestion tends to cause. Not so in your country?
 
But seriously, in formal situations out in public (in US) I've never heard anybody ask where the toilet is? This would be viewed as somewhat crude. Less so informally, though most say bathroom or restroom even around the home.

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

Me: "What do they call a conservatory in the US?"

American: "What's a conservatory?"

Me: "It's a large ground floor single-storey room extension built onto the back or side of a house, and usually has glass walls and a glass ceiling.  Very nice for sitting in for natural sunlight and warmth."

American: "Oh that's a greenhouse."

Me: *facepalms*

Edited July 8, 2022 by SarahKB7 Koskinen

[Kiera Clutterbuck]

7 minutes ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

Me: "What do they call a conservatory in the US?"

American: "What's a conservatory?"

Me: "It's a large ground floor single-storey room extension built onto the back or side of a house, and usually has glass walls and a glass ceiling.  Very nice for sitting in for sunlight and warmth."

American: "Oh that's a greenhouse."

Me: *facepalms*

I've heard the word 'sunroom' used more often, as opposed to 'greenhouse'. I don't believe I've ever heard such a room referred to as a conservatory here, but I could imagine its usage in the New England area of the US.

https://tinyurl.com/4fsss7mj

Edited July 8, 2022 by Kiera Clutterbuck

[PheebyKatz]

As for bathroom attendants, they went out of popular fashion when bog roll became a cheap enough commodity (no pun, I swear) that it was less expensive to just let people go ahead and steal it than to pay a corruptible staff member to watch over it while pretending to merely enjoy selling cigarettes in the WC.

[SarahKB7 Koskinen]

Peeve: Just discovered a billion flying ants in the garden!

FLYING ANT DAY IS TODAY!!!

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

Some toilets have bidet style spray jets built into them, but mostly, not.

This right here is a pet peeve. The bidet has existed in some form since the 17th century.

GET ONE

TODAY

[Solar Legion]

.... It's called a sun room, enclosed porch or similar.

As far as I am aware, no one here calls it a greenhouse. That is the stand alone building (only sometimes an add-on room) wherein plants are grown/housed.

Time to stop being ridiculous.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

16 minutes ago, Solar Legion said:

.... It's called a sun room, enclosed porch or similar.

As far as I am aware, no one here calls it a greenhouse. That is the stand alone building (only sometimes an add-on room) wherein plants are grown/housed.

Time to stop being ridiculous.

In Canada, both terms are in use, but have, as you say here, quite different connotations. The distinction is both functional and architectural. Conservatories are generally domestic spaces, in the sense that their function is not merely to house plants, but also to provide places to sit, eat, talk, listen to music, etc. They are for that reason usually attached to a house, and are often highly decorated (marble floors, statues, and that sort of thing). Greenhouses are most focused upon growing things, and not really intended as places to do anything else.

There is just a wee touch of Old Empire contempt for "the colonies" in a lot of these sorts of conversation, I'm finding.

Edited July 8, 2022 by Scylla Rhiadra

[Rolig Loon]

32 minutes ago, Kiera Clutterbuck said:

I've heard the word 'sunroom' used more often, as opposed to 'greenhouse'. I don't believe I've ever heard such a room referred to as a conservatory here, but I could imagine its usage in the New England area of the US.

I've heard "sunroom" in the Midwest, and I imagine it's common on the west coast. Where I grew up in the northeast, "conservatory" is quite common, but it's hard to find one except in rather large homes. We had one in our home, which was built sometime in the 1910s. My mother kept all sorts of greenery there, including at any time a half dozen shallow jars with avocado pits that were meant to root (but never did).  Anyway, it was a fine place to curl up and tangle with a crossword puzzle.

[Silent Mistwalker]

11 hours ago, Cinnamon Mistwood said:

What is the point of music if you can sing along, scream, grunt, yodel, yell, whisper, warble, croon or chant?

Dancing?

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 minute ago, Solar Legion said:

.... It's called a sun room, enclosed porch or similar.

As far as I am aware, no one here calls it a greenhouse. That is the stand alone building (only sometimes an add-on room) wherein plants are grown/housed.

Time to stop being ridiculous.

Sunrooms, greenhouses, enclosed patios - gotta travel to the rich neighborhoods around here to find all that. I wouldn't have had the first idea what it's all called (other than "prohibitively expensive" 😂). 

The local (I'm in NY) contractors that build/install those, though, do use "sunroom," "four seasons room," "solariums," and "conservatories" on their websites. No greenhouse, that I've seen.

[Silent Mistwalker]

9 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

 

 

 

 

Even after all these years, I still think he's a leprechaun. There is no other explanation!

[Rowan Amore]

53 minutes ago, SarahKB7 Koskinen said:

Me: "What do they call a conservatory in the US?"

American: "What's a conservatory?"

Me: "It's a large ground floor single-storey room extension built onto the back or side of a house, and usually has glass walls and a glass ceiling.  Very nice for sitting in for natural sunlight and warmth."

American: "Oh that's a greenhouse."

Me: *facepalms*

And I thought it was a place to study music.  

[Silent Mistwalker]

7 hours ago, Orwar said:

   Most Scots I know aren't that bothered with single malt whisky, and in reality it is an entirely pointless, idealistic concept used to make pretentious people cough up more dough for the stuff.

   My father and I attended a beer & whisky festival once where my father happened to be in an extra-Besserwisser kind of mood. He'd just been put in the background as I was chatting up a mead brewer and trying my way through their stock, whilst my father was kind of sipping on a mead and didn't understand any of what was being said, so when we were done (to the relief of the ever-growing queue behind us) he pointed at a booth across the floor by a whisky brand that are a favourite of us both. We sauntered over and I started sampling away, and this time my father decided to be the chatty one. The Scotsman behind the counter was really nice and chatty as well, but he looked a little perplexed when my father claimed that 'a whisky should be kept on the tongue for one second, for each year it had been aged', to which he replied 'nae, aa've 'erd tha' before but it ain't nothin' aa'll recommend, see whisky's jus' like anythin' else an' people appreciate tha' different flavours their oo'n way - so if ye're likin' t'ae keep tha' whisky in yer moo'th for eighteen seconds that's good on ya, but if ye need tha' much spit t'ae release tha' flavours, sounds t'er me like ya probably jus' haven' put enough water in it before havin' a sip'. 

   My father then tried to make light of people who drink 'real whisky' with ice and how that surely was a faux pas (in a rather obvious attempt to change topic), to which the response was a little something like 'again, however people want'ae be enjoyin' their whisky is their business, personally aa'm quite fond of havin' a smooth whisky on tha' rocks as an alternative t'ae a gin 'n tonic on a warm day out'. 

   That's when my father made the grave mistake of saying that's fine, as long as it isn't with a single malt because that's too fine, and that only blended whisky was suited to be served with ice. Turns out the man we'd been talking to wasn't the master distiller of the distillery as we'd thought, as we'd read in the little pamphlet he would be in the booth - but the distillery's master blender, who obviously was very proud of what he was doing; blending whisky is as much of an art as distilling the stuff is, if not more so because their job is to take whisky from several different batches (and even distilleries, when we talk 'blended') to produce a consistent product that should always be the same, and that to a level of precision that any whisky expert in the world should be able to name exactly which one it is in a blind test, whether it was bottled in 1980 or 2020. Furthermore, 'single malt' whisky doesn't mean that it isn't blended - unless it's single cask, it almost certainly is: the difference between what people refer to as 'blended' and 'single malt' is that 'blended' can use whisky produced in various different distilleries, whilst a single malt is blended only from casks from a single distillery, but can still contain a variety of differently aged and distilled whiskies to produce a drink of the same level of consistency as a 'blended' whisky does.

   If you do a batch of whisky and fill 100 casks, 10 years later you've got 100 different whiskies with their own characteristics depending on a huge variety of factors down to details such as how old the oak tree was when it was cut and whether it grew somewhere humid or somewhere drier, and unlike American whiskey laws which require a fresh barrel every time (which had nothing to do with the whiskey, but was a measure to protect the coopers' trade), Scottish whisky barrels can be used several times and have their characteristics changed from time to time, with age and how much tannins are absorbed by the spirits. It takes some very fine taste buds and knowledge of the individual flavours of a whisky to then take those 100 casks and mix them together in such a way that when you or I go to the pub and order an Ardbeg (which is single malt), we immediately go 'yeah, that's an Ardbeg'. 

   In many ways, single malt whisky is like Cuban cigars. Yeah, there are a lot of them that are really up there in terms of quality, but it's not an assurance of quality in any way, shape, or form. I've had good and bad single malt whiskies, and I've had good and bad Cubans, and the best cigar I ever had happened to be Dominican (although you never really can go wrong with a nice Romeo y Julieta, or Cohiba - I used to smoke their cigarillos a lot!).

   .. .. /rant? And uh, pet peeve: Besserwissers?

 

tl:dr

So, which is it, Glenfiddich or Glenlivet?

*runs away

 

[Rolig Loon]

20 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

There is just a wee touch of Old Empire contempt for "the colonies" in a lot of these sorts of conversation, I'm finding.

Not unlike the sort of attitude that we hear all too often about regional accents and colloquialisms in the U.S.  If we're kind, we think of their speech as "quaint".  On our worse days, it's how we distinguish among midwestern hicks, Valley Girl airheads, and anyone else we imagine is less learned than we are.

Edited July 8, 2022 by Rolig Loon

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

And I thought it was a place to study music.  

They are that too! But the etymology of the term is different, and comes from the Italian "conservatorio," which was an orphanage attached to a hospital (in the older sense of "hospital" as "hospice").

https://www.britannica.com/art/conservatory-musical-institution

(THERE! I can be pedantic too!)

[Love Zhaoying]

9 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

And I thought it was a place to study music.  

As described, I usually only see conservatories on "Haunted Houses" (in-world, or Disney's Haunted Mansion).

[Love Zhaoying]

4 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Not unlike the sort of attitude that we hear all too often about regional accents and colloquialisms in the U.S.  If we're kind, we think of their speech as "quaint".  On our worse days, it's how we distinguish among midwestern hicks, Valley Girl airheads, and anyone else we imagine is less learned than we are.

I'm thinking maybe I should spice up my language by using "whilst" a lot.

[Love Zhaoying]

12 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

 

tl:dr

So, which is it, Glenfiddich or Glenlivet?

*runs away

 

It was an interesting story. I learned stuff!

[Scylla Rhiadra]

2 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

Not unlike the sort of attitude that we hear all too often about regional accents and colloquialisms in the U.S.  If we're kind, we think of their speech as "quaint".  On our worse days, it's how we distinguish among midwestern hicks, Valley Girl airheads, and anyone else we imagine is less learned than we are.

It is particularly prevalent in cultures where old class systems are still in evidence. The "Queen's English," as taught at "public schools" and Oxbridge, is a definitive marker in England still of class, wealth, and prestige. A British friend of mine noted just yesterday, in fact, that many of the political, social, and cultural elites of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have Oxbridgean English accents because that is where they were educated.

Canada has relatively few really distinctive regional dialects, Newfoundland being the very strong exception. There is, however, a very distinct classist distinction between educated and relatively less-educated Canadians, with the accent of the latter parodied in things like Bob and Doug Mackenzie's "The Great White North" skits. It's not just about vocabulary or grammar: there is a detectable intonation and lilt associated with the latter.

[Love Zhaoying]

2 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

The "Queen's English," as taught at "public schools" and Oxbridge, is a definitive marker in England still of class, wealth, and prestige.

My memory is that several languages have "formal" vs. "informal". Chinese, Japanese?

[Silent Mistwalker]

25 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Sunrooms, greenhouses, enclosed patios - gotta travel to the rich neighborhoods around here to find all that. I wouldn't have had the first idea what it's all called (other than "prohibitively expensive" 😂). 

The local (I'm in NY) contractors that build/install those, though, do use "sunroom," "four seasons room," "solariums," and "conservatories" on their websites. No greenhouse, that I've seen.

When I build stuff, regardless of what platform I am using, my greenhouses are both attached and detached buildings. There's never any kind of seating or furnishings that are not for gardening purposes. They are not multipurpose rooms/additions like a sunroom, solarium or conservatory.

Greenhouses aren't meant for human habitation/constant occupation. The others are.

Edited July 8, 2022 by Silent Mistwalker

[Rolig Loon]

3 minutes ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

There is, however, a very distinct classist distinction between educated and relatively less-educated Canadians, with the accent of the latter parodied in things like Bob and Doug Mackenzie's "The Great White North" skits.

Or in ...