I got a million of ’em. This one’s from August. As far as I can tell, this hasn’t been posted here or in Facebook.

**

In the year 1530, the world started referring to anything that was irritating, ill-tempered, or fretful as “peevish.” It took a few hundred more years for us to call anything that made us feel all those things a “peeve.”

By 1919, we decided that not all peeves were created equal, so we adopted some from the Peeve Rescue and called them our pets. For Americans, even the pet peeve industry is huge: we are most annoyed by people who drive slowly in the fast lane, who don’t cover their sneezes sufficiently, and who chew with their mouths open.

Me? Years ago the vein in my forehead would pulse wildly every time I saw someone throw a cigarette out their car window. I’m still pretty hacked off about carpool lane poachers, and do not get me started about tailgaters, and do not start in with me about how I must be one of those slowpokes in the fast lane, because I’m not and being falsely accused of that is (you guessed it) another peeve.

Outside of the car I’ve calmed down quite a bit, and now I find myself hitting the roof over misuse of the ellipsis. You know what I’m talking about … you’re reading Facebook and someone posts a note devoid of any punctuation … it’s like they’re afraid of making a declarative, definitive statement … and all the reader is left with is a collection of wistful words that just trail off into nothing … which does nothing but paint the writer as a pale, waif-like Jane Austen heroine who has just collapsed onto a Victorian fainting couch…

Well, just cut that out. Punctuation is there for a reason, people, and the ellipsis gives its life so you can indicate that quoted material has been removed from your text. Punctuation underscores and emphasizes, keeps us from using run-on sentences, and it’s no accident that a period makes a point. There’s an entire universe of interesting colons, both semi- and full, and Oxford commas and exclamation points and brackets and braces that can make your words fun to write and to read!

(Please send all your comments about my inevitable grammar mistakes toelizabethann40@hotmail.com.)

My other pet peeve is what we fondly call the “Election News Cycle.”

Fox News has now fired the first organized shot of the 2016 presidential election by sponsoring a debate featuring the most popular eleventy-seven Republican candidates. I’d like to point out that this event was held 460 days before the day we actually have to make a political decision. Even worse, the first candidate announced for this mess almost 600 days out.

Do not encourage these people. All we’re going to get before the first primary is a bunch of Twitter-driven name-calling and trash-talking and Trumped-up drivel and (sob!) dinnertime robo-calls. If Fox News makes enough ad revenue out of these debates, they’ll never stop and then the camel’s nose will surely be under the tent and mark my words the first debate of the 2020 presidential election will be Nov. 9, 2016 and it will be all your fault and yes, I realize I’m in the middle of a ginormous run-on sentence here and I don’t care because I’m that ticked off about it.

Or peeved … I think the word here is peeved…

© E. Stocking Evans 2016