I could of made this post longer.

Could of, would of, should of, man.

(...I'll have to take a bath now.)

 

Kudzu as an example? That's a bit of a reach. You're missing the obvious one tho, which is also a shortened form of another word- flu instead of influenza.

Does using a hyphen instead of punctuation count? I really hate it when instead of ' or " authors start speech with -.

 

Flu is a good one, The others I had problems with. Kudzu because it isn't really a word in common usage. Impromptu and menu because they're actually a different phoneme - there's a "y" sound in there. It's "men-you" not "men-oo". Unless you're speaking Spanish.

 

I was skipping 'flu' because it's an abbreviation of a longer word that doesn't naturally end in 'u'. 'Menu' is personal language gripe- by all rights, it should be 'miniu', and its existence provides justification for lazy advertisers to name things 'Valu'. Of course, flue, blue and true suggest that proper spelling for 'through' ought to be 'thrue', but that's not the error we see.

English: the structural ancestor to Calvin-ball, Fizbin, and American tax codes... except on Tuesday.

EDIT: you pronounce impromptu as impromptyoo?

 

Yes.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/impromptu

 

Yes, yes I do. Almost to the point of it sounding like im-prompt-chew.

 

Why do you hate the French

Though to be fair they use a tiret (umm...an em-dash?) not a hyphen.

 

Clearly, I don't spend enough time listening to the British.

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/pronunciation/american/impromptu

 

Isn't it my god-given right as an Englishman to hate the French? Now I have another reason.

It's just a stupid method since it's harder to see when speech ends.

 

French use "-" at the start of a dialogue line, but also " (or their equivalent) at the start of a dialogue segment. And I'm pretty sure you don't notice the " anymore when you read text, and will only have to come back when there's one missing because your brain is not used to that. I can do both, and see clearly when speech ends just because of both languages.

To keep up with the thread, and the french, we have this abominable accent in Québec where the sound "oi" becomes "oé", which basically is the equivalent of talking like this: "I dunno watcha yall doin', but I ain't like it", and it fucking drives me crazy and is a complete turnoff.

 

On Wikipedia they say France uses <, << and the english quotation marks.

 

Guillemets? Those are « and », not just angle brackets

On-topic, I've come to detest the phrase 'nipples on a breastplate'.

 

Where do you go to hear something like that used in a sentence?

 

ASOIAF. Martin tends to latch on to phrases and run them into the ground, especially in the fourth and fifth books.

 

"About as useful as nipples on a breastplate," I imagine. As with many other statements denoting the same concept. Presumably from somebody that has latched onto it as their go-to commentary.

 

"I'm pregnant."

 

I'm guessing "How are you going to deal with this?" is a no, no as well.

 

Yep. Along with "I want to keep it."

 

For future reference Diet coke makes a great spermicide.

 

My vagina is crawling just thinking of that.