One of our cats thinks she is my girlfriend! When I go to bed, she immediately jumps on the bed next to me and places herself right where my hand is, so I can scratch her back and tummy.
No cat peeling here!
"I could care less" vs "I could not care less"
The amount of people who defend the former with their own head-canon is frightening. Ones I have heard are "It's sarcastic" and "I care so little that I won't put the extra effort into caring less"
https://www.google.com/search?q=steven+pinker+i+could+care+l...
From Pinker's book The Language Instinct (p.377 or 389 depending on the edition):
> A tin ear for prosody (stress and intonation) and an obliviousness to the principles of discourse and rhetoric are important tools for the language maven. Consider an alleged atrocity committed by today's youth: the expression I could care less. The teenagers are trying to express disdain, the adults note, in which case they should be saying I couldn't care less. If they could care less than they do, that means that they really do care, the opposite of what they are trying to say. But if these dudes would stop ragging on teenagers and scope out the construction, they would see that their argument is bogus. Listen to how the two versions are pronounced:
[If viewing on mobile, turn your device sideways to avoid wrapping.]
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COULDN'T care
LE
ESS.
i
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I
CARE
LE
ESS.
could
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But I hear you and sympathize with your point of view. I have been there myself. It didn't make sense to me that people would use a word or phrase in any meaning other than its literal one.
Especially a word like "literally", right?
Merriam-Webster has a article on that. It's literally the best article ever written!
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...
> From Alexander the grammarian: to avoid fault-finding and not to censure in a carping spirit any who employ an exotic phrase, a solecism, or harsh expression, but oneself to use, neatly and precisely, the correct phrase, by way of answer or confirmation or handling of the actual question—the thing, not its verbal expression—or by some other equally happy reminder.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Meditations_of_the_Empero...
In any case, "empañada" is a real word, it mean's "foggy", but used for glasses, not for the weather itself. For example, "tengo las gafas empañadas" -> "my glasses are foggy"
"Old-timer's disease" (Alzheimer's)
"Valentime's Day"
Too late to correct him now! May he rest in peace.
(In fact I see that it is mentioned at the beginning of that article!)
A similar one that I used to get wrong all the time is empanada. No ñ in that either, but I always said em-puh-NYAH-duh. Then one day I noticed it was just a regular n and it is pronouced em-puh-NAH-duh.
Now for a really embarrassing one. This was back in the day when I was working with my friend and colleague Alan Cooper (of interaction design fame) on what became Visual Basic. We were on a phone call and I said something about a zhuh-NAIR of music. Alan asked "what's that?" I explained that it was like a category or a particular style. He said "do you mean ZHAHN-ruh?"
It's funny how these embarrassing moments stick in your brain. I could tell you exactly where I was, and even which direction I was facing when we had that conversation.
But I was grateful that Alan corrected me and I won't sound like a fool any more when I talk about a genre.
I had one friend who would never gracefully accept a correction like that. One time he told me about a neighbor who "took his dog to the pond." I said "that's nice, does the dog like to go swimming?" He said "no, the POND, the place where they put dogs to sleep."
He went through his whole life mispronouncing "dog pound", and many, many other words.