Completely unimportant language misuses that bug you

[Teddy]

I'm personally not all too bothered about misuses in the English language, which isn't particularly strange, since I'm a non-native speaker who happens to like bending the rules as much as I like the rules themselves. In Swedish, though, where multi-word nouns are compounded, we have the problem of "särskrivning" (literally "apart-writing, and an example of a compounded word), where some people are unable to tell when words should be written together. Sometimes it shifts the meaning of the sentence (often in hilarious ways), but usually it just makes you look uneducated. I've heard studies claiming that it isn't a matter of education, but rather a psychological profile which can't learn when not to separate words, so I try not to judge the people themselves. But it is annoying nevertheless!

Also people who don't know that an acronym is a subset of initialism and not the whole thing.

Isn't it the other way around?

"The proof is in the pudding." "The exception that proves the rule." Actually, anything where "proof" actually means "test" but isn't used as such.

To be fair, I think "proof" always has been used in the sense of "confirmation" and not "test" in at least the latter expression (I'm not familiar with the former, but if it means what I think it means, then probably there as well). We have the very same expression in Swedish ("undantaget som bekräftar regeln"), with the sole difference that we say "confirms" instead of "proves", so unless we imported it from English after some drift in meaning, it probably hasn't drifted at all. Wiktionary seems to confirm this ("the exception that proves [the existence of] the rule", "the proof [you seek] is in [testing] the pudding"). That said, I can agree that we maybe don't reflect very much at what these expressions actually say.

[...]
I'm sorry that respectable jobs (like janitor and ditch digger) are hard to come by, but please don't debase the language with alternate words for shill.

For as long as there has been a word for "a person selling things", it has carried a reputation for dishonesty, and a desire from people in the trade to get away from that reputation.