I can never switch off from being irked by poor usage of the English language. Whenever I have free time, this irritates me even more than usual, because I subsequently have freedom to dwell upon it. Last weekend, at a wedding, several annoyances rained down on me like confetti within the space of around 10 minutes. I had to share.

Usually, at a wedding, I spot simple mistakes in the grammar of menus and signs within the host venue.  I often find that the more fancy and costly the venue is, the more mistakes they present.  Arrogance, perhaps?  Lack of attention to detail owing to resting on the laurels of having an award-winning spa, world-famous cream tea, or once having been frequented by a Royal or two? Or maybe it’s just proof that money can’t necessarily buy you basic literacy skills? You can imagine, it took months to find the venue for my own wedding.

At this particular wedding, my issue was actually with the guests. This is not entirely new for me.  At recent celebrations of matrimony, I’ve had the guestbook removed from my eye-line on many an occasion, as my friends and family fear I may pick up on and point out a less than grammatically perfect offering of love and best wishes.  I didn’t require my highlighter pens at this celebration, however, as my attentions turned to what some of the guests were actually saying.

A multitude of words and phrases have always annoyed me anyway, but when I heard three of them all in the very same buffet queue, it served to put me right off my hog roast.  I had stomached enough.

First up was “LOL”, or “lol”, if I give it the level of importance it actually deserves.  There’s nothing funny about this one.  It’s bad enough when people jot it in a text, a Facebook status or a tweet, as it’s usually related to something that barely raises a smile, never mind a laugh out loud, gut-wrenching snort of humourous appreciation. The annoyance lols (lingers on longer) however, when somebody sees fit to verbalise this acronym.  How lazy do you have to be?  And if what you are referring to is that funny, why don’t you just go ahead and laugh?  I imagine the next step will be that very tired people will no longer involuntarily inhale deeply with a wide-mouthed stretch, but will instead just scream “YAWN” in people’s faces to mark their reaction to their sleepiness.

Next on the list is a word I probably hear and read around twenty times a day, regardless of the mundanity of the situation I find myself in: “Awesome”. To clarify: Mount Kilimanjaro is awesome; Michaelangelo’s Sisteen Chapel ceiling is awesome; The ability for science and technology to place a human being on the moon is awesome.  Sage and onion stuffing, napkins that the bride’s sister has designed herself, and a taxi that only costs £12 to get you back to your hotel two villages over at 1am…  not awesome. Get some culture.

The word that really irritated me though, and yet perhaps the one that had more of a place than the other two given the context, was “hubster”.  I’m all for coining a phrase and making up my own words in the way that we’re assured Bill Shakespeare often did, but this particular neologism just makes me feel… well, I can’t even think of the word!  Pet names for reference to a partner or loved one can be truly endearing, of course, as they represent a personal bond that’s no doubt borne out of some shared experience or in-joke, but this generic reference to a husband is beyond cringe-worthy and a also little bit degrading.  You hear “hubster”, you think “hamster”…  Just me?

I know, it’s a wonder I get invited to these things.