A "pet peeve" is something that we personally find extremely annoying but other people often aren't bothered (as much) by. Normally a pet peeve involves something small such as fingernail biting, ear scratching, or lolspeak. As far as I've always known somebody can have multiple pet peeves, as "pet" in this instance means to me as "unique to a person"; for example, a pet peeve of mine is when someone is eating down my ear, and another pet peeve is when someone types "a men/women" when the grammar should be "a man/woman".
When reading a forum today I saw a person discuss one of their "biggest pet peeves", and they were corrected by other forum members saying that a "pet peeve" is a person's biggest peeve: to them it was redundant to say "biggest pet peeve". This contradicted my long-held understanding of "pet peeve", as I defined above; when I Googled the term the general consensus among the websites I viewed supported my interpretation, although a couple of other sites supported the other view.
Do you have pet peeves and a biggest pet peeve, or just peeves and a pet peeve? I can certainly understand the other interpretation and where the redundancy comes from, but I'm curious to hear more opinions given that I had never heard of or thought about it until today.
Well I've always seen it as if you can have multiple pets then why can't you have multiple pet peeves? And so I would say I've a few pet peeves :)
ReplyDeleteHa ha! That's a neat perspective! Love it. :D
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