Things that bug me

EKE_38BPM

msmancunia wrote:

EKE_38BPM wrote:

PMT twice a month - Not a problem, you'd sync in a few months so it would just be one big PMT-fest, rather than two 'little' ones.
Bloke who supports Man City - Mutually exclusive. Real men support teams who play in red. London teams who play in red. North London teams who play in red.
Reads actual books - You are looking for a bloke in Manchester, right?
Mountain bike vs Road bike - I thought Mancunians needed mountain bikes to ride on the roads because of all of the cobbles?

Hmm, you've got a point there. Ok, how about...
Doesn't support Man U
Can read
Can ride a bike.

That's casting the net a bit wider, don't you think?

And I do have a soft spot for Arsenal - I lived across the road from them for four years, but when push comes to shove City will always be my team.
And real Mancunian girls have road bikes to ride over our cobbles - it's a bit like our version of the Paris-Roubaix...

So, you are after a bloke who doesn't support Man U but can read and ride a bike. Thats pretty damn wide. Good luck. You shouldn't need it though as that will include just about every man in the world, maybe start narrowing it down a bit again. Throw in an age range (not 18 to 80) and a body type (I'd guess athletic).

Enjoy kissing frogs until you find your prince.

cjcp

The Sidi adverts on Eurosport.

And the Eurosport timing schedule, which seems to play havoc with Sky+.

In fact, were it not for their coverage of cycling, Eurosport full stop.

evil_breakfast

There's a woman in my office who continually answers the phone "Good morning corporate greeting.... even in the afternoon.
her "record" stands at 14.45
What about the watch on your left wrist?
What about the time in the bottom right hand corner of your VDU?
What about the time display on your phone?
I constantly find myself fighting the urge to go over and explain the concept of time

roger_merriman

Kieran_Burns wrote:

msmancunia wrote:

You know the thing that really would put me off driving on the other side of the road? PMT twice a month - mine, and hers. It's just not worth it. Give me a bloke who's taller than me, supports Man City, reads actual books and knows the difference between a mountain bike and a road bike, and I'd be happy. Not that easy to find though :roll:

Ermm.... I guess a few missed this... how tall are you exactly?

my sister always had that problem being close on 6ft and welsh lads aren't known for being tall...

veronese68

evil_breakfast wrote:

There's a woman in my office who continually answers the phone "Good morning corporate greeting.... even in the afternoon.
her "record" stands at 14.45
What about the watch on your left wrist?
What about the time in the bottom right hand corner of your VDU?
What about the time display on your phone?
I constantly find myself fighting the urge to go over and explain the concept of time

Keep saying "good morning" until about 3pm. The mornings may drag, but the afternoons absolutely fly by.

Kieran_Burns

roger merriman wrote:

Kieran_Burns wrote:

msmancunia wrote:

You know the thing that really would put me off driving on the other side of the road? PMT twice a month - mine, and hers. It's just not worth it. Give me a bloke who's taller than me, supports Man City, reads actual books and knows the difference between a mountain bike and a road bike, and I'd be happy. Not that easy to find though :roll:

Ermm.... I guess a few missed this... how tall are you exactly?

my sister always had that problem being close on 6ft and welsh lads aren't known for being tall...

My best mates 13 year old daughter is now taller than me.

I'm 6' tall

It's like being in Brobdingnag 'round their place.

cat_with_no_tail

roger merriman wrote:

my sister always had that problem being close on 6ft and welsh lads aren't known for being tall...

It's not that they're not tall, just that many of them haven't quite evolved to walk fully upright yet.


People who think that adding some coloured grips and QRs to a bike make it worth eleventy million pounds.
People who feel the need to post the RRP of every single extra part added to their bike and expect us to believe that's what they paid.

cjcp

I nearly forgot: The Beatles, and pretty much anything to do with them. I wish they'd just sod off in their Yellow Submarine.

CiB

EKE_38BPM wrote:

Garidge and garage.
I know I'm right on this one and I did a bit of googling. I found a thread on a forum where someone asked the correct pronunciation of 'garage' compared to 'storage' and 'mirage'

This proves EKE is right wrote:

Yes, garage and mirage (most likely) come from the French.
But "storage" is English, there is no such verb as "storer" in french. It was probably constructed on the model of the others.
What is interesting (to me at least ) is that in French, "storage" is "stockage", from the English "stock" and the French suffix -age.
-age is added to a verb to express "the action of..."
(se) garer -> to park, un garage -> a place where you can park a car (parking lot, car-park; garage : where they are parked to be repaired)

So, CiB, you can now talk proper like me and the Queen.

Well whoopy-chuffing-dooo. I'm not relying on some wiki written by some illiterate youth-of-today specimen using modern speech patterns & pronunciations to guide me through Her Majesty's English, Use Thereof. When I grew up it was pronounced garridge by everybody; parents, family, people in our village, people from the next village and even people from the big town beyond that we went to sometimes in the Land Rover. I'd bet my left knee-cap that the BBC always used garridge back then too. Like I said earlier, just because a new generation or two has bowled into view with different (i.e. wrong) ways of doing things that the rest of us were quite happy doing properly, and with that have introduced strange and unusual ways of saying words, that doesn't make it right. His name escapes me for now but a few years ago there was a bloke on TV a lot who spoke with a strange drawn-out semi-American accent. Tell you what, he was the guide. However he pronounced something, that was the way not to say it. In a race between my proper English for eleventy generations background and some johny-come-latelies on this 'ere internet, it's not even close.

Man Utd. They bug me, to the nth degree. Not today though. Today, they made me smile, a lot, so much indeed that I almost lost my voice cheering. And with that, Leicester are officially a better team than man Ure, being in the 5th round when they're not. </fan logic>

Edit - forgot the

cjcp

Why don't you lot who aren't Welsh pronounce 'tooth' correctly? It should be pronounced like 'twth', as you would with 'soot' and 'foot'. Instead, you say 'tooooooth'.

Very odd.

deptfordmarmoset

Garridge v garage (cont'd)

I'm not sure that the French origin of the word means that it should be pronounced with a light stress on the 2nd syllable and with a very soft g. If it did, you'd have to pronounce the similar French word ''forage'' to rhyme with mirage. I've never heard it pronounced in any way other than ''forridge'' i.e. stress on the first syllable and a crunchier g. This is a typical English stress pattern.

How you pronounce garage probably depends on how much French you put into your English.

daviesee

deptfordmarmoset wrote:

[The French gave up pronouncing their aitches centuries ago but they still insist on having 2 different aitches. According to them, one's aspirate and the other is not aspirate. As they don't bother sounding the letter, the difference is a completely pointless exercise and it completely screws up the liaisons.

Try Quebec French.

Honda Accord = Onda Haccord.

I could never understand that one......

daviesee

Rolf F wrote:

[

t4tomo wrote:

Americans - yes all of them.

Have you actually met any? Almost all of them that I've met have been really nice and friendly. I have mostly been to the nicer parts though (Colorado, Oregon, Washington State etc) but it really strikes me every time I go how nice they are. Of course, politically they are terrible but individually its a different story. I wish Brits were more like them in many ways.

Good point. They seem to export their worst ones. Much like the French and their wine.

I have found them to be wonderful hosts on their own turf.
Thick as mince on foreign topics mind........

SimonAH

cjcp wrote:

Why don't you lot who aren't Welsh pronounce 'tooth' correctly? It should be pronounced like 'twth', as you would with 'soot' and 'foot'. Instead, you say 'tooooooth'.

Very odd.

Ah forsooth he hath lost his tooth in the booth, well that was smooth!

cjcp

daviesee

It's the littlest of thing that bug.

Typing "teh" instead of "the". I thought it was a typo but it is happening far too often.
My computer even corrects it ffs. It took me 3 attempts to do "teh".

Re garage.
As far as I remember it has always been "gar - adge with a silent d.
Neither idge, or as in mirage.
Face it. Around the Country almost everything is pronounced differently.

The BBC stopped being the example when they stopped wearing black tie for the radio

deptfordmarmoset

daviesee wrote:

deptfordmarmoset wrote:

[The French gave up pronouncing their aitches centuries ago but they still insist on having 2 different aitches. According to them, one's aspirate and the other is not aspirate. As they don't bother sounding the letter, the difference is a completely pointless exercise and it completely screws up the liaisons.

Try Quebec French.

Honda Accord = Onda Haccord.

I could never understand that one......

There's no way anyone could ever understand Quebeckers. But French, wherever possible, alternates vowels with consonants. It might be those two as next to each other that force a kind of false liaison.

daviesee

deptfordmarmoset wrote:

There's no way anyone could ever understand Quebeckers.

They are quite easy to understand really. Just talk about the only things they care about.

Beer
Wine
Food
Hockey
& Women

Not necessarily in that order :twisted:

rick_chasey

People who say "same difference" instead of "same thing".

Totally different meaning.

"Coke, Pepsi? Same difference".

ARGH.

msmancunia

Kieran_Burns wrote:

msmancunia wrote:

You know the thing that really would put me off driving on the other side of the road? PMT twice a month - mine, and hers. It's just not worth it. Give me a bloke who's taller than me, supports Man City, reads actual books and knows the difference between a mountain bike and a road bike, and I'd be happy. Not that easy to find though :roll:

Ermm.... I guess a few missed this... how tall are you exactly?

Oh, only 5ft6. I just had a bad experience on the one internet date I ever went on - he said he was 5ft11, turned out to be 5ft6. Like I wouldn't notice...

Libraio

daviesee wrote:

It's the littlest of thing that bug.

Typing "teh" instead of "the". I thought it was a typo but it is happening far too often.
My computer even corrects it ffs. It took me 3 attempts to do "teh".

Do you type with ten fingers whilst looking at the screen instead of the keyboard? I do, and if I'm trying to type too fast my right index finder reacts just a tiny bit faster than my left middle finger. Hence teh.

EKE_38BPM

daviesee wrote:

Rolf F wrote:

[

t4tomo wrote:

Americans - yes all of them.

Have you actually met any? Almost all of them that I've met have been really nice and friendly. I have mostly been to the nicer parts though (Colorado, Oregon, Washington State etc) but it really strikes me every time I go how nice they are. Of course, politically they are terrible but individually its a different story. I wish Brits were more like them in many ways.

Good point. They seem to export their worst ones. Much like the French and their wine.

I have found them to be wonderful hosts on their own turf.
Thick as mince on foreign topics mind........

I was in Miami chatting to a friend of a friend who is a customs officer and gun nut. He was convinced that the only reason that Hugo Chavez wouldn't invade America is because the citizens own so many guns. Not the Coast Guard, not the Navy, not the Army, not the seven countries between Venezuela and America but the fact that the citizens have so many guns.
He seemed like a reasonably intelligent bloke up to that point, but then he proved he was American.

A friend and his wife went to America for the first time just before Xmas and just hated the people. They said the Yanks were overly nice and saccharine when they wanted a tip (hotel staff, waitressess etc) and just downright rude if they didn't (just about everyone else). I think they only really saw the service industry side of America, not the general public, so its easy to come away with that opinion.

Like Davisee said though, they are shocking on things happening outside of their borders. I agree with the saying that America goes to war to teach their citizens geography.

rick_chasey

EKE_38BPM wrote:

daviesee wrote:

Rolf F wrote:

[

t4tomo wrote:

Americans - yes all of them.

Have you actually met any? Almost all of them that I've met have been really nice and friendly. I have mostly been to the nicer parts though (Colorado, Oregon, Washington State etc) but it really strikes me every time I go how nice they are. Of course, politically they are terrible but individually its a different story. I wish Brits were more like them in many ways.

Good point. They seem to export their worst ones. Much like the French and their wine.

I have found them to be wonderful hosts on their own turf.
Thick as mince on foreign topics mind........

I was in Miami chatting to a friend of a friend who is a customs officer and gun nut. He was convinced that the only reason that Hugo Chavez wouldn't invade America is because the citizens own so many guns. Not the Coast Guard, not the Navy, not the Army, not the seven countries between Venezuela and America but the fact that the citizens have so many guns.
He seemed like a reasonably intelligent bloke up to that point, but then he proved he was American.

A friend and his wife went to America for the first time just before Xmas and just hated the people. They said the Yanks were overly nice and saccharine when they wanted a tip (hotel staff, waitressess etc) and just downright rude if they didn't (just about everyone else). I think they only really saw the service industry side of America, not the general public, so its easy to come away with that opinion.

Like Davisee said though, they are shocking on things happening outside of their borders. I agree with the saying that America goes to war to teach their citizens geography.

Yanks know American geography better than we know European (or even British in some instances) geography, and it's similar in size (well, in terms of human popualtion)

EKE_38BPM

Rick Chasey wrote:

EKE_38BPM wrote:

daviesee wrote:

Rolf F wrote:

[

t4tomo wrote:

Americans - yes all of them.

Have you actually met any? Almost all of them that I've met have been really nice and friendly. I have mostly been to the nicer parts though (Colorado, Oregon, Washington State etc) but it really strikes me every time I go how nice they are. Of course, politically they are terrible but individually its a different story. I wish Brits were more like them in many ways.

Good point. They seem to export their worst ones. Much like the French and their wine.

I have found them to be wonderful hosts on their own turf.
Thick as mince on foreign topics mind........

I was in Miami chatting to a friend of a friend who is a customs officer and gun nut. He was convinced that the only reason that Hugo Chavez wouldn't invade America is because the citizens own so many guns. Not the Coast Guard, not the Navy, not the Army, not the seven countries between Venezuela and America but the fact that the citizens have so many guns.
He seemed like a reasonably intelligent bloke up to that point, but then he proved he was American.

A friend and his wife went to America for the first time just before Xmas and just hated the people. They said the Yanks were overly nice and saccharine when they wanted a tip (hotel staff, waitressess etc) and just downright rude if they didn't (just about everyone else). I think they only really saw the service industry side of America, not the general public, so its easy to come away with that opinion.

Like Davisee said though, they are shocking on things happening outside of their borders. I agree with the saying that America goes to war to teach their citizens geography.

Yanks know American geography better than we know European (or even British in some instances) geography, and it's similar in size (well, in terms of human popualtion)

Maybe they do, but Europeans know world geography a bit, European geography quite well and a smattering of US geography. Yanks only know Yankland and where the Yanks have fought a war.

cjcp

Rick Chasey wrote:

EKE_38BPM wrote:

daviesee wrote:

Rolf F wrote:

[

t4tomo wrote:

Americans - yes all of them.

Have you actually met any? Almost all of them that I've met have been really nice and friendly. I have mostly been to the nicer parts though (Colorado, Oregon, Washington State etc) but it really strikes me every time I go how nice they are. Of course, politically they are terrible but individually its a different story. I wish Brits were more like them in many ways.

Good point. They seem to export their worst ones. Much like the French and their wine.

I have found them to be wonderful hosts on their own turf.
Thick as mince on foreign topics mind........

I was in Miami chatting to a friend of a friend who is a customs officer and gun nut. He was convinced that the only reason that Hugo Chavez wouldn't invade America is because the citizens own so many guns. Not the Coast Guard, not the Navy, not the Army, not the seven countries between Venezuela and America but the fact that the citizens have so many guns.
He seemed like a reasonably intelligent bloke up to that point, but then he proved he was American.

A friend and his wife went to America for the first time just before Xmas and just hated the people. They said the Yanks were overly nice and saccharine when they wanted a tip (hotel staff, waitressess etc) and just downright rude if they didn't (just about everyone else). I think they only really saw the service industry side of America, not the general public, so its easy to come away with that opinion.

Like Davisee said though, they are shocking on things happening outside of their borders. I agree with the saying that America goes to war to teach their citizens geography.

Yanks know American geography better than we know European (or even British in some instances) geography, and it's similar in size (well, in terms of human popualtion)

I'll need convincing of that, but, assuming it's correct, it's perhaps because the language over that land mass is generally the same, whereas the same cannot be said for Europe. That might make it easier to learn. Another reason for this is that some US states have right-angled borders, or are even square; the same can't be said for our counties or the borders of the continental countries. To take the latter point further, American geography hasn't really changed a great deal, whereas Europe had "little f***ing countries"* sprouting up, so European geography has been a little more fluid.

*Rob Newman, circa early 1990s

daviesee

Libraio wrote:

Do you type with ten fingers whilst looking at the screen instead of the keyboard? I do, and if I'm trying to type too fast my right index finder reacts just a tiny bit faster than my left middle finger. Hence teh.

By that reasoning, you see on the screen that you have typed it wrongly but still continue :?:

EKE_38BPM

"LOL" I can handle. "LOOOOL" I can't.

mitb

People saying ‘Pacific’ in place of 'specific' does serve one useful purpose, in that when you hear it you are left in no doubt that the person you are speaking to is truly, remorselessly thick and you will gain nothing from finishing the conversation. Means you can wonder off and get on with your life. Sorry, but if you can’t deal with the fact that two words that sound quite similar aren’t, in fact, the same word, you have nothing to offer. In fact, you are bucking hat.

dhope

mitb wrote:

Means you can wonder off and get on with your life.

Wonder if you meant wander off?
It's okay, they sound similar I know

EKE_38BPM

"okay" bugs me. I feel that it should be "OK".