Dear Prudence,
During quarantine I agreed to let my husband help me overcome some genuinely bad linguistic habits of mine. These include overusing like, correcting with questions rather than being direct (“Isn’t X north of Y?” rather than “X is north of Y”), jokingly mispronouncing words (saying the P in pterodactyl), using dated slang, etc. Another is my habit of using you instead of one or me. For example, “That sense of disappointment when you reach for a chocolate chip cookie only to discover that it’s actually oatmeal-raisin.” I often don’t even realize I’m saying these things, so he helpfully points it out. However, now that we can return to a safely distanced social life, I’m feeling conflicted. He told me that my speech patterns were endlessly irritating to himself and others, but our friends seem more dismayed by his frequent corrections. People say his reminders sound disrespectful and disrupt the flow of conversations. Yet if he waits to remind me of all the things I’ve said, I feel greater shame and anxiety and don’t have a chance to correct myself. I want to be a better person, but I don’t want to make him look bad in front of others. How do I navigate this? (If you could possibly answer in a non–Slate Plus forum, that would be really great. Getting Slate Plus back is my agreed-upon reward for reaching the goal of not saying like—or any of these other things—for one month!)
—Keeping Quarantine Goals