A lot of the things people think are "wrong" are actually when shorthand (or other abbreviations) happens to collide with an existing word. Great example of this being "gas" for "gasoline". It's not because we think it's in the gaseous phase, it's simply shorthand for gasoline.
- Mechanical keyboard (when referring to a computer input peripheral). Mechanical vs. electric typewriter - now, that's something I get. In the former, the mechanical force of the typist hitting a key is translated to the motion of the hammer by purely mechanical means while in the latter there is always some kind of electric actuator involved. But for computer keyboards? Come on, how is a rubber membrane providing some "springiness", resistance and returning force for the key being pressed any less "mechanical" than, say, a metal spring? Both kinds of keyboards involve a microcontroller scanning an array of electrical switches and translating key presses into digital codes. While I understand what the actual difference between "mechanical" and "non-mechanical" computer keyboards is, the classification itself doesn't make any kind of sense to me.
This is, I think, similar to gasoline, in that I think it's shorthand for a keyboard that uses discrete mechanical keyswitches. That is, of course, what really distinguishes them.
Digital copy when referring to an asset (music file, game) provided over the network, not involving a physical media. Clunky as it is, I could kinda sorta almost accept the term as long as it means "digital vs. physical" even though it's messy and inaccurate. The problem is, people got (quite understandably so) confused to the point of now calling Blu-Ray discs analog 
Not once have I seen a guy posting on a forum that he's got an "analog copy" of the game and by that he means he's got a frickin' Blu-Ray copy of a game. EDIT: yes, I understand that the actual signal as being picked up by the BD drive laser detector is analog in nature and requires further conditioning/interpretation to be considered digital but I think that's beside the point here.
If someone called a blu-ray "analog" I'd call them an idiot. But "digital copy" and "physical copy" form a nice, logical contrasting pair. (Especially since a digital copy can be conveyed by any means: online, disk, etc.)
Computer guys always talk about CMOS as being an IC in the computer.
No, not "computer" guys. It's PC (as in, Wintel PC) guys only!
But the biggest fault: Talking about a Voltage and Amperage when you talk about electric tension and electric current. 
(in Dutch we use spanning (tension) )
English uses "tension" in very limited contexts. Otherwise, "voltage" is established. ::shrug::
This is not limited to the English speaking world. The Germans do the same. 
They do more wrong, They call the sea a meer and a lake is a see. In Dutch a sea is zee and a lake is meer. A seastar in Dutch is zeester. The Germans call it a seester instead of a meerster
Bzzzzt. It's more subtle than that:
Das Meer (I assume from the Latin "mare"), der Ozean = the ocean
Der See = the lake
Die See = the sea
My guess is that it's Dutch that got the words "wrong", if anything, by using "meer" for a lake.
"Next". It mystifies me why most people use 'next' to mean "the one after this one coming up soon."
It can definitely be ambiguous!
Misuse of "post" and "reply" words in buttons on forums. For example one private forum I frequent, in which a reply entry box is always present, and the button used to cause your text to be posted, is called "Reply".
Where the sensible thing would be to have no text box till you click "Reply", you type a message, then click "Post".
The person in charge of coding that forum cannot see anything wrong with how it is now. Like the damned words don't actually have specific meanings in English.
Well that's not misuse "in general usage" (the topic of this discussion), but rather a user interface cobbled together by someone who gave it no thought. Or by code sharing between segments of the system that shouldn't be shared…
Momentarily is the one which bothers me. Why is the plane only going to land momentarily at its destination? Isn't that where the passengers were suppose to leave the aircraft?
THIS!! This truly is a language pet peeve of mine. What's wrong with "shortly"
The mental image of the plane basically doing a go-around, with pax doing Captain Kirk rolls out of the plane onto the tarmac…
When talking about the data transfer rate of serial interfaces most people use the term "baud" instead of "bps". And another commonly misused term for the throughput or data transfer rate of networks, lines and internet access is "bandwidth".
baud is correct (named after Emile Baudot) and when applied in the digital domain is defined as 1 bit/second.
No. Strictly speaking, baud refers to the symbol rate. But the symbol rate hasn't been 1:1 since the 2400bps modem days, as others have said. By using more complex modulation schemes, we encode more than one bit per symbol, hence a bitrate that's higher than the baud. (Since the actual baud isn't of particular importance to the end user, this hasn't been shown in specs for ages.)
I don't use commas (or apostrophes) correctly myself. I was talking about the specific case where they are completely omitted, making the text difficult to understand. It is particularly horrible when documentation lists something, and you are left wondering where the delimiters are. Especially if some of the text includes the serial comma and some does not.
Something like "a, b; c; d, e, f" is pretty clearly an ordered set of three isubsets, with "a" and "b" in the first set, "c" in the second set; and "d", "e", and "f" in the third set. See what I did with the semicolon there? It may be wrong or annoying, but it sure makes the list clear!
As someone who's worked as a professional technical writer, I hate most of the rules that people are taught in school, which are
literary rules, as opposed to rules designed to rule out ambiguity and enhance clarity. As such, in comma-separated lists, yeah, I'm gonna use a comma for each item. And if there need to be commas inside a list item, then I'll use semicolons as you did. But if possible, it's even better to just avoid a comma/semicolon-separated list altogether, and instead use a bulleted list.
It has been a problem for a long time. Whence "1.44 MB" floppy disks?
Megabits vs. megabytes is bad enough.
But I swear to god, I was once in a Circuit City store and two corpulent sisters were looking at the "digical" cameras, and of course the spec they were comparing the most was the "megapickles". (Cucumbers being good for weight loss, I suppose.)
Data ARE, not data IS 
Since the word "datum" is all but extinct, I see no issue with treating it as a noncountable group noun.
The problem though is that you end up sounding like a pompous arse if you say it correctly. Same as for "whomever" and the correct pronunciation of "valet".
Huh? The only pronunciation I've ever heard for that word is "val-ay", like the original French. Are you saying there are people who pronounce it "val-it"?!?
Same as when people talk about their Por-sha. 
But it's a German name.
How would it being a German name make a difference?
Because the name of the company is pronounced Por-shuh, not porsh. It's not snooty, it's simply correct.
Nobody uses Ω anymore?
When I am writing or producing documentation, sure. But computer systems and unicode are now so screwed up that the Ω symbol is increasingly unreliable. It used to work great back when code page 437 was ubiquitous.
Firefox does not even allow me to enter it directly without issuing a page back command.
Sounds to me like a Firefox bug (probably a Firefox on Windows bug). At least on the Mac, using Unicode for things like Ω has worked fine for a
very long time. Outside of online services involving outdated servers, I haven't run into encoding issues for probably over 15 years.
People cover their food with tomato tomato sauce. (Tomato Ketchup)
That's a reasonable disambiguation, though. If you've not already discovered mushroom ketchup, your pies, stews and sauces are missing out. (No tomatoes included!)
Exactly!! If you know the history, you know that ketchup used to mean a savory sauce, which could be made from various things. For example, here's an 18th century recipe for the aforementioned mushroom ketchup:
The word ketchup itself is believed to come from the Indonesian
ketjap manis.
What of "Pièce de résistance"? Many English speakers use it to mean "the cherry on the cake", but it actually means the main course, the thing that provides sustenance.
I think you're wrong on this. The original French phrase means exactly what it does in modern English: the masterpiece. The phrase literally meant "the piece with staying power". That could be the main course, but it also could be something else. If the memorable course (or work) is small, so be it. It's about being memorable, not about being large.
You prove my point. The US uses it the way you say but it's not what the word means. Most, if not all, of the rest of the English-speaking world use it in the way that it actually means, i.e., the course that precedes the main one. BTW, I've never heard of it used as "the cherry on the cake".
So what do you think it means?!?
Using the word "Professional" for all kinds of
cheap and cheerful - i.e. crappy - equipment.
Ugh, yes, don't get me started… I think the German-speaking world is unusually bad about this: marketers will plant the word "Profi" on absolute junk. On the Swiss equivalent of ebay (ricardo.ch), seeing the word "profi" on a listing instantly signals to me that it's garbage being peddled by a greedy vendor who knows nothing about the field. (It's full of "profi" soldering stations that are absolute garbage.)
When software/firmware screens say "We" as in "we are", when whatever it's doing is client side. There is no "we" in a machine...unless they mean the Tron people. 
I suspect this comes from people who aren't technical writers doing the writing, and confusing the gerund ("Printing…") with the infinitive and the 1st person plural somehow ("We are printing…"). That and confounding the "we" used in marketing ("We are the world leaders in blah blah blah…").
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