OK, quite a big list here, if we're talking about abuses of language...
- Irritating malapropisms, like using "decimated" for "devastated" and "disinterested" for "uninterested", which are so commonly used they're actually starting to assume the meanings of the words they're mistaken for.
- That most hideous of all clichés, "giving 100-and-
x percent" - this is so frequently used that if you now say someone gave a 'mere' 100%, it sounds like they did't really try that hard at all. Footballers and their managers are extremely prone to this.
- In fact, some footballers seem to have perfected a form of English consisting almost entirely of clichés: "Well it was a game of two halves but we gave 110% and at the end of the day we got a result." AAAARRGGHHH!!!!
- Speaking of clichés, it annoys me the way Americans often use the stem of a verb as an adjective, rather than the past participle - for example, describing something as 'cliché' (rather than 'clichéd'), or calling a person 'tan' (rather than 'tanned').
- Another American usage that does my head in is "I could care less", when they mean "I couldn't care less". I mean, come on, it's not that fucking difficult, is it?
- And pronunciation of words like "herb" and "human" as "erb" and "uman", to the point where people actually say things like "an erb". Like the old "an hotel" you sometimes hear in UK English. Dammit people, English != French...
- Oh, and I was talking to someone the other day who said "that's the exception that proves the rule". Well think about it for a moment - an exception
disproves a rule, doesn't it? The word 'prove' in the original phrase actually means 'test'.