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What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on? (programming.dev)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

1260 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 weeks ago (12 children)

Dampening

And

Damping

One is literally making things wet.

One is reducing movement or oscillations in something.

And so many people get it wrong, then right, then wrong in the same damn paragraph. My god.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

This shows them as interchangeable for either use? What am I missing here?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/damping

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dampen

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Historical use, vs evolving English use.

Just like literally is now figuratively.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

This is literally the opposite of what happened. "To damp" was used to mean "to moisten" in the 1670s, a hundred and fifty years before "dampen" started to be used for it also in the early 1800s.

As with many if not most of the pedants in this thread, you're dying on a hill that's actually just straight-up wrong.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Oh, that makes sense. Usage creep bothers me, too. Especially the "literally" thing. I know gatekeeping is unpopular, and linguists will tut-tut you for being prescriptivist. But some language shifts are just fucking dumb and make people sound dumb.

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