Common examples are when folk say "try and" when they really mean "try to", "could of" because they confuse it with "could've", or (horribly) "nukular" instead of "nuclear". In writing, confusion of "except" with "accept"; "licence" with "license".
Why do Americans often - in both written and spoken English - say "Question:" before asking a question? Do they expect us to precede the answer with "Answer:"?
Another Americanism is to use "z" in spellings where we use "s" - which is OK, but I've seen some American documents which use "Lazer", which suggests either that they don't realise it's an acronym, or they think it stands for "Ztimulated".
Leaky Acronyms are a special case of misunderstanding - people know roughly what the acronym means, but clearly not exactly: Most common is "PIN Number", but I've often heard "AC Current", "SCSI Interface", and many, many more.
"Shopaholic" and "workaholic" ... obviously formed by analogy with "alcoholic", to describe people addicted to "shopahol" and "workahol".
Misuse of superlatives ... it doesn't make sense to say "more perfect", "very unique" or "less optimal".
Some use of catchphrases is fun, e.g. a TV comedy catchphrase. It's a quick way of bonding (as we Americans say) with someone, a shorthand for showing you both enjoy the same stuff. On the dark side, it's used for sad people to hope to acquire some cool by saying something The Kids recognise. Some really wind me up:
"How Cool's That?" - The idea is that you sound much cooler if you say "How X is that?" instead of "That's X". I spose for maximum American coolness, you'd say"Question: How Cool's That?".
"Twenty Four Seven" is much cooler than "all the time". Dunno why - it's obviously a busy week, but once the week's done, presumably you're at leisure :-)
"Oh. My. God." ... I've no idea what coolness the extra punctuation adds.
Noddies: They often have only one camera at interviews, but they believe our little lives will be enrichened by seeing some interaction with the interviewer. Rather than swing the camera from interviewer to interviewee, or have a longer shot showing them both, they film the entire interview with the camera fixed on the interviewee, then when he's gone back to running the country (or whatever), they point the camera at the interviewer and film five minutes of "noddies" - the interviewer nodding, looking concerned, amused, intrigued etc., for later editing. That makes us happier, doesn't it?
How did he get there? Sometimes the news wants to show us e.g. politicians going door-to-door canvassing votes. The TV news camera crew is walking along the street with the politician then up to a front door and rings the bell - that's OK. But then we see a shot from inside the house, with the constituent going to answer the door! This crosses the line from factual news to fictional drama.
On Location: When the news want to tell us that there's been discussion at Westminster or delays at Heathrow, they believe we won't fully understand what they're talking about unless they send a TV crew to send back the report while standing outside the buildings.
Too Much News: There isn't enough news for the 24hr rolling news programmes, so they either endlessly repeat themselves, or dredge up trivial drivel.
Local News: Local news folk are frustrated with the tedium of local news, so they will try anything to associate themselves with a big story, or to link local tedium to someone famous.
Even when they set very low limits, they're still too fast when it's foggy, or icy, or going past a school in the morning ... if we're expected to judge speed then, why do we need a posted limit at all?
Still, the government's happy either way, as they get the revenue from speed cameras.
It's been a long time since Henry Ford made his famous "... as long as it's
black" utterance, and now we have the technology to paint cars in
colour! This seems to have escaped some people though.
It seems that the bigger and more expensive the car, the less likely it is to be coloured - it's rare to see a BMW or Mercedes in other than black or dark grey. I suppose that's understandable, as these are mostly the domain of Senior Executives, who are both old (and have therefore run out of imagination), and don't want to offend others with a brightly coloured car.
What's unforgivable is when small, cute cars are deprived of colour:
the ones which seem saddest to me are the Peugeot 206 cabriolet, the Smart, and
the Lotus Elise. These are available in the most fantastic colours, yet I'm
sure there are more grey 206CCs than coloured ones :-(
It hadn't even occurred to me that it was possible to get
black or grey Smarts, yet sadly there are a few around.
Incidentally, the use of names like "silver", "anthracite" or "titanium" doesn't distract from the greyness of the car!
I'm undecided about whether other default colours show a similar lack of
imagination: Ferraris and Ducatis do look a bit odd in anything but red,
yellow or black ... but then red is the no-imagination choice for sports cars,
so that's just as bad as black. Our blue car's nice :-)
The saddest thing is to see people flying the Union Jack on St George's day :-(
Most crimes of precision are through thoughtless use of conversion factors, e.g. about "about a mile an a half" becomes "about 2.41401601 kilometres". We have a paint brush whose width is given as "2 inches / 50.8mm" ... I'm sure you've seen plenty of paintbrushes where the width is accurate to a tenth of a millimetre!
Our GPS V - presumably made by people good with maths - used to say things like "50.4 feet to go" ... which implies an accuracy of 1.2 inches, despite GPS accuracy being no better than tens of feet. To their credit, Garmin have changed it.
