linguistic pet peeves

1. Its vs. it's. It seems like 1% of the population actually gets this right. Here's the correct way to handle these two words:

It's = it is. For example, "It's not my job" = "It is not my job".
Its = possessive form of it. For example, "Each guitar has its own special tone and characteristics."

2. Hypercorrection of "xxx and I". For example, many people say things like this, thinking they'll sound more intelligent:

"Send an email to John and I, and we'll look into it."

This is grammatically incorrect. Take away the "John and" above, then say the sentence. Understand now why it's incorrect? "I" is not an object, so don't use it like one.

3. "Chipotle" is not pronounced "Chih-POL-tay". Duh.

4. Chinglish. Since I get this almost every day, it's gone from being funny to being irritating. For example, I work with a guy nicknamed bunnie (yes, lowercase, and yes, weird). Every time I hear his name from my Chinese colleagues, I hear "Bernie", despite having corrected this multiple times.

More Chinglish irritations:

Ever - The Chinese love to do direct translations of the Chinese word that they think directly translates to "ever", but unfortunately, there isn't one. It thus ends up being used like this:

"I have ever been to the U.S."

WRONG

Kindly - There's some English textbook that the entire People's Republic of China must be using, because they love to use this word in ways that I've never seen a native speaker use it. For example:

"Steve, please kindly review and provide your comments."

NO

Well - Another incorrect direct translation from Chinese. For example:

"Well noted on your comments, Steve."

Copycat writing - I've noticed that things I write are often quickly copied by my Chinese colleagues. I suppose I should be flattered that I have disciples running around Shanghai, but I wish they understood well enough to come up with their own creative writing styles, minus "well", "ever", etc.

5. Business-speak in all its ugly forms. Here's a list of meaningless corporate babble that I hear on a regular basis:

synergy
low-hanging fruit
burning platform
laser-focused
holistic (often misspelled as "wholistic" - lame)
ping

Don't understand some of these? Consider yourself lucky.

Business-related words that have become annoying because they're so overused:

touchbase
aligned
headwinds
learnings (not even a real word unless you're a corporate stooge, like me)

If you're going to use one of these words, at least preface it with an apology for being a douche.

6. You know - here's a little self-hate. I probably say "you know" at least once a minute, and I've been trying not to say it so much. No one wants to hear filler ("like", "whatever", etc.), least of all me.