Traveling across the US is like switching to an alternate dimension where everything is pretty much the same, but a few things are off. Like, Congress is the same, but suddenly there are dunkin' donuts everywhere and the land is weirdly flat
People say ‘whenever’ instead of ‘when’ and I want to clock them for it.
eta: I’m specifically disparaging the southern US states here. They just flat-out use words wrong, and I can say that now that I’m too far away for them to kick my ass.
I can see why you've read it that way, but I'm quite sure they're saying that some people say a word slightly differently in another part of the USA and they're joking that it makes them angry.
It’s a minor niggle I was joking about with hyperbole, but it does bother me a bit because ‘when’ means a specific time and ‘whenever’ means any of multiple times. Their meaning isn’t interchangeable.
Like: ‘I talked to my dad when he was in town’ means I talked with him that last time he was in town, but ‘I talked to my dad whenever he was in town’ means any or all the times he was in town – it might have been a hundred times or two, I can’t tell, but not the one time like the other more accurate sentence.
It doesn’t make me mad, but it very briefly ruffles my feathers. (e: and then I move right on)
I honestly get why it bugs you, there are things like that that bug me too. I can’t think of any at the moment (fairly intoxicated), but I definitely know of some words (not specifically at the moment, again, intoxicated) that irk me when misused. Not as much now that I’m older and I’ve met incredibly intelligent people who can’t even spell their own name. Well, that and my own ego has shrank by at least three quarters.
When I believed that I was some hyper intelligent alien, every misuse of a word made me cringe to my core.
At 38 years old (recently gained a year because for some reason I thought I was 39), I realize that I’m not shit and younger me just needed to feel superior for whatever reason.
I don’t know. I’m drunk. Sorry if I made no sense or was insulting in some way.
52 here. I think I get more annoyed with certain phrases the older I get. Like I said, not enough to be actually aggravated, but certain phrases raise my hackles every time, and ‘whenever’ is a big one.
It may be because there’s someone on a podcast I regularly listen to who does this, or it may be because I’m a writer and am more keyed in to errors like this, or it may be both.
Oh I get that big time. I was listening to Dan Cummins do a podcast about Julius Caesar recently and every time he said Pompey like “Pompeii” I screamed at my speakers, “IT’S POM-PEE!!! GODDAMNIT! IT’S POM…PEEEEEE!!!”
But he prefaces his episodes by saying, “I’m gonna mispronounce the fuck out of these names.” So I calm the fuck down and carry on haha.
I’m a writer too (or I was, and then life said, “oh, you didn’t wear a condom? Here are some babies. Here’s a lot of them, you’re a dad, not a writer. You’re as bad at being a father as you were at being a writer too. Enjoy!”)