Things that irk

I’ve intentionally excluded low-hanging fruit like “could of” from this list. That’s too easy.

Myriad of
Ditch the ‘of’. Myriad possibilities. Myriad errors. Myriad irritations.

Biweekly
Fortnightly.

Purposely
Until recently, I didn’t even believe ‘purposely’ was a word. “Deliberately”, “intentionally”, “purposefully” or “on purpose” had always sufficed.

Could care less
Wish I could.

Irregardless
(Posted without comment)

Overwhelm
Overwhelm is a verb that people use as a noun. I hate it. Apparently, it has been used as a noun since the 16th century, so shows you what I know, but man I hate it.

Melancholy
You’re feeling melancholic. There’s something melancholic about the song. I’m filled with melancholy that dictionaries don’t support my view that we should never use melancholy as an adjective or adverb.

‘An’ vs ‘A’ for acronyms
You received an SMS, you’re chatting with an LLM. You would be chatting with a Large Language Model if you said it out, like that, in full.

Poor use of brackets If you put a phrase in brackets, the sentence should still work without that phrase. For example:

• Evaluation of a (complex) expression.
  • Wrong!
  • “Evaluation of a expression”: should be “an expression”
• I’ll have to go to one (or perhaps many) libraries.
  • Wrong!
  • “I’ll have to go to one libraries” is a nonsense.
• This has been an absolute (and unexpected) joy.
  • Correct!
  • “This has been an absolute joy” is totally fine.

Often in such cases there are no good solutions. You must, and with equanimity, accept that language requires you to phrase your sentence differently. That last sentence illustrates that the same principle applies to comma-separated phrases too (“and with equanimity”).

Other times, you can reword it while still keeping the brackets. Here’s a real-life example: “A state table containing an (typically sparse) array of transitions for each state.” Saying “an typically sparse array” sounds wrong orally. I would rewrite this thus: “A state table containing an array (typically a sparse one) of transitions for each state.” It introduces an interruption in the flow, but at least it keeps the brackets near where the author intended.