Via Household Opera, a pet-peeves meme:
• Grammatical pet peeve. Misplaced apostrophes. My father, God rest his soul, once commissioned a huge sign that read Season’s Greetings From The Teachout’s. I secretly attempted to paint out that damned apostrophe, but to no avail. It caused me years of annual adolescent embarrassment, though I’m pleased to say that I wasn’t enough of a smartass to tell my father about it. (Orthographic runner-up for jazz musicians only: if you can’t spell Thelonious Monk’s first name correctly, write about somebody else.)
(I used to be irked by the increasingly indiscriminate use of the singular “their,” but have since been inundated with irrefutable evidence of its impeccable historicity. Enough already–I give up!)
• Household pet peeve. Guests who don’t close lids completely. May they be forced to walk barefoot over kitchen floors littered with shards of broken Mason jars.
• Liturgical pet peeve. Two words: crappy music.
• Wild card. Logorrheic quarterwits who jabber on their cellphones while walking down the street–especially those who use handless headsets. The garrote is too good for them, but it’s a start.