What Annoys Me

So we're supposed to come up with a pet peeve. This is a rather dangerous thing to have me do, since I'm liable to come up with them as I write. For instance, I hate the word "so". And I hate it when people write generic descriptions like "a rather dangerous thing". And I hate it when people don't follow the British convention and put ending punctuation inside the quotation marks. And I hate it when people start sentences with "and".

But most of all (but is just as bad as and), I hate people who try to change the language for the sake of being politically correct. The worst is gender pronouns. In English, as in many European tongues, the male form is used in examples, e.g. If a student objects to your ruling, you may tell him that he should go die in a subterranean cavity. This has caused such uproar in recent years that many of succumbed to the tedious linguistic practice of representing both, "him or her", rather than accepting that one, out of convenience and tradition, is used for brevity's sake. Likewise, female pronouns are used exclusively to represent other entities, specifically the embodiment of ideals and inanimate objects. Liberty, Justice, Victory, Sweden, France, and the HMS Pinafore are all unequivocally female. No one has called this into question.

In matters of racism, too, it may be quite well enough to, out of a decent degree of respect for mankind, endeavor not to use offensive terminology. However, too retroactively do so is a disgusting and egregious form of vandalism. For example, the Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None contains a nursery rhyme as part of its plot, the title of which was used in the film adaptation. However, all editions currently in print have no mention of Indian Island, nor or Ten Little Indians. They have magically become soldiers. Similarly, a great many school districts have banned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for its use of a certain derogatory term rhyming with "trigger", despite the fact that it is used in a historically accurate context.

Moreover,

I'd better stop.

^don't you hate it when people do that?