Latest Peeves and Perps

• This ... Don't start a sentence with a "This" of unclear referent. Your prose might seem to flow along nicely when you write it, but the reader often doesn't know what you mean: which previous noun, idea, situation, or piece of the current paragraph are you pointing to with "This"? The vague sentence-starting "This" is quite a common problem in scientific writing: I dealt with it rather academically in the original pet peeves doc., but the fix is easy. SIMPLY NEVER start a sentence with "This" unless the next word is a noun, and even then you have to be careful. So "This shows that...", or "This means..." or "This caused..." are BAD. "This problem..." could be OK as long as there is no ambiguity about which problem you mean (maybe several were mentioned previously).
• "It's" for "its." Pernicious and ubiquitious. Easy slip to make but also easy to search for and eradicate. I certainly do it now and then: I've seen it in expensive advertising copy and best-selling novels, most recently one by Neal Stephenson. Remember, "his, hers, its; NOT hi's, her's, it's".
• Beg the question. If you hear, read or (sorry) use this expression, chances are about 95% it's being misused. It does NOT mean "suggests (forcibly suggests, demands an answer to) the question". It's a lame translation of petitio principii , the classical (we're talking Cicero's time) logical fallacy of appealing to (hence "begging") the principle (hence "question") in order to prove the principle. Best known example of question-begging: "Have you stopped beating your wife?" begs the question that wife-beating has taken place. Considering the issue of how much trial lawyers' fees should be increased begs the question that they should get fees at all (instead of getting shot, for instance). Sample perpetrators: well, I haven't seen it used right in the last 10 years, so everyone.
• "Crescendo" for "climax" . How did this get started? Typical misuse: "The argument reached a crescendo." Crescendo is the process of getting louder, not some sort of high point. Wall St. Journal a particularly obnoxious perp here.
• "Spectrums, millenniums, datums," for "spectra, etc." Gimme a break. This sort of insult (along with split infinitives) is why I stopped subscribing to the Scientific American. .
• "Going forward" for "in the future". Actually, this is something people say but not something people tend to write. Let's keep it that way. All of a sudden this business-speak has replaced a perfectly good prepositional phrase. It's quite common, especially in talks by deans and CEOs. There's even a UR bureaucrat who says (I'm not making this up) "On a going forward basis". Yikes.
• "Everyday" for "every day". Presumably not a problem in scientific writing but you never know. The former is an adjective meaning 'used, fit for, or coming every day', as in "great for everyday use". "Every day" is an adverb, meaning 'quotidian', or 'daily'. WSJ gets this wrong all the time.
• "Circa" for "a date in the past" For example, "This winery was built circa 1786", or a sign on a B&B: "Circa 1821". Circa means "around" in the sense of "approximately" and is used when the exact date is unknown. Thus one tends to round to the nearest decade, half-century, or century, depending on the uncertainty.