Most Bizarre Errors You Constantly See

[Vausch]

Pretty much every time someone says the phrase "Evolution is just a theory".

Look up the term "Theory" in a scientific sense, then you may talk. Otherwise, I present you a dunce cap.

That makes me want to smack them up. That's the reason I have stopped using the word theory when I am not certain about things since I want to make a distinction between the use of the word. A theory is not just something we think for fucks sake!

What makes me want to smack them is when they say "creationist/ID theory".

ID is not a theory. There is no evidence for ID. They are not on equal grounds and teaching both to students is not "Presenting both sides of the argument", it's introducing religious aspects into a classroom that by law they should not be exposed to outside of a class that specifically teaches religious studies.

Just seeing you write tha sent a shiver down my spine despite knowing you're a reasonable person.

I actually had this exact discussion where someone said that intelligent design and evolution should be considered as 2 different scientific theories since having one theory seemed narrow minded. I asked him if we should also have a theory that things dropped fall upwards before I explained exactly wju we can only have one theory about something, the nature of a scientific theory, why evolution fits the requirements and why creationism does not.

He actually agreed with me at last. Proudest moment of my life.

It's not so much when someone just says it because they don't understand what the term means. It's more like people that have an agenda and are wilfully ignoring the proper definition while assuming that every argument has equal validity. It's pretty much what you just said with the hypothetical gravity situation except they actually are assuming it's just as valid. THAT is what gets to me.

 

[Kyoufuu]

The word 'anyways'. Anyway is not a noun, you cannot have more than one anyway!

Also, all spelling ones. 'definite' has no 'a' (it's just 'finite' with a prefix, how fucking hard is this?), 'lightening' is an increase in light levels, 'no one' is two words (who the fuck looks and 'noone' and thinks 'yup, looks good to me!'?) and to lose is to be defeated whereas 'loose' is the opposite of 'tight'.

Do you use someone, anyone, and everyone? If so, why not use noone?

 

[Yopaz]

Pretty much every time someone says the phrase "Evolution is just a theory".

Look up the term "Theory" in a scientific sense, then you may talk. Otherwise, I present you a dunce cap.

That makes me want to smack them up. That's the reason I have stopped using the word theory when I am not certain about things since I want to make a distinction between the use of the word. A theory is not just something we think for fucks sake!

What makes me want to smack them is when they say "creationist/ID theory".

ID is not a theory. There is no evidence for ID. They are not on equal grounds and teaching both to students is not "Presenting both sides of the argument", it's introducing religious aspects into a classroom that by law they should not be exposed to outside of a class that specifically teaches religious studies.

Just seeing you write tha sent a shiver down my spine despite knowing you're a reasonable person.

I actually had this exact discussion where someone said that intelligent design and evolution should be considered as 2 different scientific theories since having one theory seemed narrow minded. I asked him if we should also have a theory that things dropped fall upwards before I explained exactly wju we can only have one theory about something, the nature of a scientific theory, why evolution fits the requirements and why creationism does not.

He actually agreed with me at last. Proudest moment of my life.

It's not so much when someone just says it because they don't understand what the term means. It's more like people that have an agenda and are wilfully ignoring the proper definition while assuming that every argument has equal validity. It's pretty much what you just said with the hypothetical gravity situation except they actually are assuming it's just as valid. THAT is what gets to me.

Yeah, I agree with you, both are infuriating, but one is clearly worse than the other.

When debating this I don't try to make them agree that creationism is bullshit and evolution is the correct one, but rather than one fits the definition of a scientific theory while the other does not. If I can get them to admit or understand that then I consider that a success.

The word 'anyways'. Anyway is not a noun, you cannot have more than one anyway!

I've got two whys for you to ask whys not? Is always haves mores thans twos anyways.

Honestly speaking, I used to make the mistake of writing and saying anyways before I learned enough English. Most of my English came from watching TV and forums none of which are actually that good places for proper grammar or spelling...

 

[Itdoesthatsometimes]

The infinitive nature of anyway, means accepting that it may be a noun and/or be able to be pluralized.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

I work at RAF High Wycombe as part of the Air Component. I work in a bunker too... so I rarely see grass and mud let alone roll around in it!

But all forces do basic training with the same rifle. There is a set 16 hour training done for everyone as part of initial training... even padres have to do it!

I'm surprised your alive with that serco catering. SHH, I believe that bunker is still officially secret, black mark on your next DV.

Haha! Probably about as secret as this sign:

I think google earth blew most secret bunkers out of the water... Can't hide a nuclear bunker anymore; now it's all over wikipedia!

Haha! Our food is surprisingly good here! In fact, it's the best I have had on an RAF base! The only better food I have has has been on tri-service establishments! ISS is the one you want to avoid!

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

It might just be me, but honestly, whenever i see people shortening words into 3-letter-initialisms it sends torrents of rage towards my very core! mainly because its becoming ridiculous, to the point where its like they're speaking in code, half the time I'm romping around the internet i keep running into shit like MRW, IMO, JFC and half the time i have to decode this shit myself (because looking it up is a sign of weakness!)

speaking of initialisms,

NASA, SOPA, NATO are Acronyms!

FBI, CIA, ICBM are Initialisms!

there have been several times I've seen people say an initialism is an acronym or in worst cases an abreviation is an acronym!

now i hope I haven't screwed up those fact, or I'm gonna look like a douche

There is a confusion with the two as well, and it depends which 'writing experts' you ask. Some insist that initialisms have to be proceded with 'the' which would mean ICBM is an acronym. (Interesting one to pick by the way. Do you deal with them at work?)
Others will insist that as long as it's pronounced as individual letters then it is an initialism... then is RAF an acronym or an initialism? Half of people say it as a word, where as the others spell it out.
Then what is something like 'btw'? People will read 'btw' as 'by the way' not individual letters.

Some dictionaries have now changed the meaning of acronym to incorporate initialisms too, so with language evolving this should irk you no more!

 

[EMWISE94]

There is a confusion with the two as well, and it depends which 'writing experts' you ask. Some insist that initialisms have to be proceded with 'the' which would mean ICBM is an acronym. (Interesting one to pick by the way. Do you deal with them at work?)
Others will insist that as long as it's pronounced as individual letters then it is an initialism... then is RAF an acronym or an initialism? Half of people say it as a word, where as the others spell it out.
Then what is something like 'btw'? People will read 'btw' as 'by the way' not individual letters.

Some dictionaries have now changed the meaning of acronym to incorporate initialisms too, so with language evolving this should irk you no more!

Nah, I'm not in any military workforce, I just have a friend thats really keen on weapons and all things that go boom, sometimes we talk about the dangers, usefulness and flaws of certain weapons and stuff. As for my standing on initialisms, if you say each letter like you're spelling it then its an initialism to me, sure there been arguments as to terms like URL which are spoken quickly enough to sound like a word would fall under acronym. As for stuff like BTW,FYI,BRB sometimes people spell em out, sometimes they say the uncompressed words as a whole so I guess it depends on the person.

bah! evolution of the english language indeed! I guess it just bothers me a bit because I type in full words all the time unlike my peers who all seem to shorten words willy nilly to the point where it comes across as lazy and in some cases incomprehensible.

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

-The liberal usage of various particles that we hardly ever directly interact with.

Spoiler

You probably know what I'm on about. Neutrinos, gravitons, quarks, antimatter, dark matter, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. So many times you'll hear in sci-fi things something to the effect of 'Fires the anti-matter cannons!', 'Spin up the graviton thrusters.' or 'I'm picking up a large neutrino emission.' Yeah, no. Lemme just break it down:

A neutrino is roughly the size (in terms of mass, since measuring the radius is an iffy prospect) of an electron (in the order 10^-31 kg, about 10000 times smaller than a proton or neutron) but without a charge. Considering how small the nucleus of an atom is compared to its total 'volume' enclosed by its electron orbitals, something like 1-2% of the total volume (don't quote me on that, I'm probably wrong), and how small the neutrino is, it's no surprise that interactions between atoms and neutrinos are exceedingly rare. Now, size isn't everything with this, since electrons, given enough energy, can interact with a nucleus. However they can do so due to their negative charge, which allows them to interact with the positively charged nucleus through the electromagnetic force. Neutrinos being neutral can't do this, and will more often than not pass straight through several atoms before actually hitting anything. In fact, a neutrino can pass through about 1km (again don't quote me on that) of lead before actually hitting something. This makes neutrinos pretty damn hard to detect, and harder still to use as projectiles. They also DON'T MUTATE what with them being all fundamental and shit.

Gravitons are the hypothetical exchange particles in gravitation. Kinda like virtual photons for electromagnetism and W-bosons for the weak interaction. The key word in that was HYPOTHETICAL i.e. we don't know with much certainty if it even exists let alone how it behaves. Chances are, it won't really be of much use to us.

There are a few more but I didn't realise how long I'd take writing about neutrinos.

In Sci-Fi a sudden burst of neutrinos could perfectly be interpreted that a weapon (or spacecraft or piece of technology) using very energetic reactions (fussion, cosmic ray, particle accelerator level of energy and reactions) is being activated. Also they may have better detection equipment (they don't need the large pools of pure water) that could detect the burst. It is usually very abdlydone, but there are context where it could be justified.

Very true. Although, it really bugs me that on a ship about the size of a medium airplane, the detectors don't take up a huge amount of space, when in reality they would be fairly sizeable, even with more advanced technology to miniaturize it.

Also, W-bosons (and Z) have been measured. Also, I believe that virtual photons are very close to normal photons (mostly changing in the lifespan), so they have been detected.

I wasn't saying other exchange particles hadn't been measured, just that the graviton hadn't been detected.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

There is a confusion with the two as well, and it depends which 'writing experts' you ask. Some insist that initialisms have to be proceded with 'the' which would mean ICBM is an acronym. (Interesting one to pick by the way. Do you deal with them at work?)
Others will insist that as long as it's pronounced as individual letters then it is an initialism... then is RAF an acronym or an initialism? Half of people say it as a word, where as the others spell it out.
Then what is something like 'btw'? People will read 'btw' as 'by the way' not individual letters.

Some dictionaries have now changed the meaning of acronym to incorporate initialisms too, so with language evolving this should irk you no more!

Nah, I'm not in any military workforce, I just have a friend thats really keen on weapons and all things that go boom, sometimes we talk about the dangers, usefulness and flaws of certain weapons and stuff. As for my standing on initialisms, if you say each letter like you're spelling it then its an initialism to me, sure there been arguments as to terms like URL which are spoken quickly enough to sound like a word would fall under acronym. As for stuff like BTW,FYI,BRB sometimes people spell em out, sometimes they say the uncompressed words as a whole so I guess it depends on the person.

bah! evolution of the english language indeed! I guess it just bothers me a bit because I type in full words all the time unlike my peers who all seem to shorten words willy nilly to the point where it comes across as lazy and in some cases incomprehensible.

Haha! You would hate the military then... acronyms and initialisms everywhere; just for the sake of having them! My favourite are the bacronyms (now officially a word) which are acronyms where the name was made to fit the acronym. Like a HARM missile, there they obviously wanted it to be "HARM" so they dropped the 'S'. HARM is High speed Anti Radiation Missile.

I also like initialisms and acronyms that contain others. There is an organisation called the NRF, where the N stands for NATO. Technically it should be NATORF...

 

[Thaluikhain]

Oh yeah another one that really clips my begonias.

"The reactor's going critical!"

Oh, well that's good. Means it's entering its normal operational parameters after all.

Oh boy, nuclear reactors and nuclear materials
1.Reactor can't cause nuclear explosion (worst case scenario it can have effect of radioactive bomb)
2.It is fairly easy to filter out radioactive particles from water
3.YOU CAN'T GET SUPERPOWERS FROM RADIATION, DAMMIT!!!

Relatedly, if an atomic bomb goes off, ducking and covering is a good idea. If you save you from an initiation next door, but people some miles down the road will have their chances of survival greatly increased.

Goddamn dinosaurs without feathers.

I can understand older stuff doing this, like Jurassic Park and what not, because they were made before it was discovered that Dinosaurs had feathers.

But stuff with Dinosaurs in it nowadays doesn't have that excuse, like the newest Walking with Dinosaurs thing. They still depict dinosaurs as giant reptiles, when in actual fact they were closer to giant birds:

It is certainly true that many were feathered, however some are believed not to have been, and there is debate on some.

 

[likalaruku]

As a fan of glitches, I will see very similar bugs in games made on different engines by different developers.

*Windsock glitch: A dead NPC get locked into a mesh & flails around like this.

Spoiler

*Body horrors. The #1 reason people probably play FIFA, unless they're in it for the surprise buttseck.

Spoiler

*Gravity defiance.

Spoiler

*Mutation abomination.

Spoiler

 

[GoaThief]

Eh the one that I see most common on here is 'I could care less'

Yeah, that.

Also, "I resemble that remark" not in jest but earnest instead of, "I resent that remark".

 

[Soundwave]

I'm pretty tired of seeing spaceships in tv, movies and videogames, almost exclusively being designed like water-faring vessels. It makes far more sense for spaceships to be designed like skyscrapers (with the engines at the bottom) using acceleration as the artificial gravity.

 

[Heronblade]

Goddamn dinosaurs without feathers.

I can understand older stuff doing this, like Jurassic Park and what not, because they were made before it was discovered that Dinosaurs had feathers.

But stuff with Dinosaurs in it nowadays doesn't have that excuse, like the newest Walking with Dinosaurs thing. They still depict dinosaurs as giant reptiles, when in actual fact they were closer to giant birds:

Some had feathers, and some were closer to giant birds. Don't make the same mistake they are.

Exactly how many Dino species have feathers is still up for debate, but last I saw, only about a dozen non-avian species were confirmed to have feathers, with about twice that many having fuzzy hair like filaments. Anything beyond that is speculation. Furthermore, all of the confirmed species come fairly late in the fossil record. Because of this, it is relatively safe to assume that feathers are a recent development.

 

[Surpheal]

There is one that I see pop up and down again and again, probably due to people posting and reposting things that they find that they like. This grievance is that if you wish on a star you see, that star is actually long dead, just like your dreams.

Now while your dreams may well and truly have been dead, that star you were looking at more than likely is not. These people don't seem to know that stars lifespans are incredibly long, even the truly massive stars take a few ages to die (spectacularly I might add). Even when they do die, they still lay the ground work for many more stars to follow in their place. This isn't even counting all of the stars too dim to see with our eyes, or the ones springing to life in places like the Orion nebula.

In conclusion, stars live for a long ass time, and the next person to perpetuate posts like that without thought is getting lamped.

 

[Queen Michael]

Since Frankenstein's Monster's name got brought ip, allow me to throw in his appearance and how he was created as well. He wasn't stitched together from body parts, he was grown from scratch in a tank using a little bit of Frankenstein's flesh.

I read the book a while ago, and I'm fairly certain that's not how it happeed.

 

[FPLOON]

Well, it's not so much an "error", per se... But, assuming you've just found out I'm a Brony, you would assume that I found out about the series through a friend, through memes, or something along those lines that would cause my first initial reaction to be either negative or confusing, in terms of believing that a "Brony" existed beforehand...

Uh... Actually, I just tuned in to the series during the beginning 2011 episodes of Season 1, kept watching like any other show, and didn't think none the wiser that it was "weird" or "different" to watch a show for little girls... (So, yeah... I'm not that special... or that hipster-ish, whatever that initially means...)

 

[beastro]

Meaning that the state nor federal gov't can't make laws that favor one religion over another, which includes atheism.

I'll assume poor wording, but that's another error, talking about atheism as if it was religion.

Oh and while we're on religion, another error I commonly see is assuming that Christianity is the same as Catholicism.

Hmmmm... this is an interesting one.
I would define religion as a set of beliefs. An atheism is supposed to be a lack of beliefs. It is kinda like a shadow. Shadow is made by a lack of light. problem is that I know many people (both with belief and with out) that would define atheism as a belief that there is no God. That would than make it a religion. Stupid I know but people are stupid. Both sides have their crazy ones.

It's taking a stance on something that is unverifiable.

Only agnosticism can get away from this because it takes no stance whatsoever.

But stuff with Dinosaurs in it nowadays doesn't have that excuse, like the newest Walking with Dinosaurs thing. They still depict dinosaurs as giant reptiles, when in actual fact they were closer to giant birds:

Only species of Dromaeosaurids have been linked to feathers and they only predominated during the Cretaceous. The vast majority of dinosaurs did have uncovered skin and rare preserved traces of their impressions have been found for quite awhile.

With that said, feathered dinosaurs just look silly. Give me the old JP raptors any day.

 

[Thaluikhain]

With that said, feathered dinosaurs just look silly. Give me the old JP raptors any day.

XKCD would disagree with you:

Spoiler

Having said that, we have grown up with featherless ones, will take a bit of time for feathers to seem as cool.

 

[Grottnikk]

Where I live it's people not understanding that 'Hispanic' and 'Mexican' are *not* interchangeable terms! Drives me up the wall...

Oh yeah...likewise Muslim/Arab/Persian, and people not knowing where Africa and the Middle East are.

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

-Ambrose Bierce