archivePet Peeves

Having just returned from a quick trip to Tampa to visit my best friends, I was reminded of how strange airplane boarding zones the airlines use can be.

You'll have to forgive a post about a little pet peeve of mine, but I've seen it for so long that it's time to ask: What does blog mean to you?

If you're 'fortunate' enough to live near neighbors who don't mind rattling your windows with loud music past 2 am, what do you do?

If you browse as I do, with multiple browser tabs open at the same time, one of your biggest frustrations surely must be autoplay videos.

I don't know why or how it became fashionable to use floss picks in public, but it's time this little custom disappeared. Sometimes, I just don't know what's wrong with people. I mean, really, where's the home training? You may have heard of “floss picks.” They're those little plastic things...

The supporters of National Cell Phone Courtesy Month may have created for themselves an unwinnable battle against people who refuse to be polite.

They don't seem to teach cashiers one of the basic tenets of customer service these days: paying attention to the customer. I stopped by the grocery store last night and had just enough items in my shopping cart that I didn't want to deal with the self-checkout counters that have...

At lunch, I couldn’t help but notice a young couple a few tables away whose attention remained focused on an iPad. It was something we had in common. I wrote this post on my own iPad while I ate. But no one could possibly have been disturbed by what I was doing. I was quiet. They weren’t.

When you make something possessive, you need an apostrophe. Most of the time. There’s one notable exception that seems to trip people up all the time.

hen you ask the average reader what his biggest grammatical pet peeves are, a trio of words generally always appear near the top of the list. So here’s a simple way (I hope) to tell the difference easier.

When it comes to game shows, I’m pretty old school. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, because I grew up watching the best of the genre, produced by big names like Goodson-Todman, Barry & Enright, and Bob Stewart, just to name a few. In the 1970s, a...

Okay, grammar fans, it’s time for another quick lesson. Remember back to your grade school days when you learned all about these neat little things called contractions. There was don’t instead of do not. There was they’re instead of they are. And there was could’ve instead of could have. Could...

There are times when I genuinely feel sad for smokers. It’s not often, but it happens occasionally. The other night, I was at a restaurant for dinner and I found myself sitting next to a table of three women who were asking the waitress about locations where they could smoke....

A quick pet peeve: I just heard a commercial about a phone company that promises to reduce your bill, and one of the first soundbites comes from a customer (or actor portraying a customer) who says he is “sir ann” he pays too much for his service. He’s who?? It...