My pet peeve is when people disdainfully dismiss something as “pretentious,” “arbitrarily weird,” – or the like – in a social setting where they know they’re unlikely to be challenged to demonstrate they’ve understood it fully enough to make that judgment. For example, a person may not be able to appreciate a text due to ignorance, but rather than be honest or stay silent they instead adopt a tone of obviousness and claim it is overlong or complicated when their purportedly shorter or more plainly spoken translation of it would leave out recognized aesthetic virtues or subtleties of meaning communicated by the original (or even just aspects of it plausibly helpful or relevant to others).
Variations on this peeve seem to occur commonly, e.g. when the term “weird” is used dismissively (often preceded by “just”). These sorts of dismissals often strike me as attempts to exploit social conformity and transform perceptions of that which may be independently perceived by others as interesting or worthy of note into something unworthy of further social elaboration. These attempts seem motivated by little more than the perception that if such things were recognized popularly they would represent a threat to one’s ego or social power. My peeve is for dismissals that demonstrate opportunistic willful ignorance at the expense of not just one’s personal potential for knowledge but others’ as well, which makes such common behavior as dismissing the intriguing as "weird" not just selfish but plainly insidious. For the good of all humanity, the next time you hear someone dismiss something cool as "just weird" punch them in their junk.
