hated expressions

Train stations are the best place. My two favourite phrases are "We are waiting to platform the train" and "This train is non stopping at this station".

But also the use of the suffix of -able to turn any word into an adverb

and people who deliberately don't use punctuation 'cos they think it's cool or summat. It makes it hard for me to read.

Tom

Actively enjoying it all

Here's my hate list:

- I'm lovin it (thank you, McDonalds)

- appending 'yeah?' to any sentence

- the 'Neighbours speak' way of turning every statement into a question

- With all due respect.....(i.e. NONE)

- Respect your elders and/or more senior in any food chain. This one truly rankles. Anyone that deserves and demonstrates respect in reciprocation will get it, anyone that relies on age or position to command respect will get just the opposite.

There'll be more coming once my bile rises further.

ag

ag,

Excuse me, but I have dibs on numbers 1 and 2 on your list (see McDonalds thread and pg. 1 of this thread). Now get your own .

Dan

Mine:

"Hey big guy" and "What's up big guy?"

Actually, I typically hate the people who use these expressions more than the expressions themselves.

Dan

We can hate the same things.

The McDonalds thread reminded me just how much I hate the phrase.

I also can't abide "anaesthesiologist". Why make a complex word more so? It's 'anaesthetist'.

aaarrrghhhh

ag

Pizza Hut's new tagline is also annoying:

"Gather 'round the good stuff!"

I also can't abide "anaesthesiologist"

I have a meeting tomorrow with a man who describes himself an "ergonomonist", as in one who is experienced in ergonomics.

I am looking forward to hearing him successfully say it out loud as frankly it's got me stumped.

Matthew

Anaesthetics vs anesthesiology. Yanks drop the (a)e. I believe its something to do with cultural hegemony and subjugation of ancient Greek linguistic heritage. Anaesthetics itself sounds lovely as if meaning an absence of aesthetics which in many ways is true. Any derivation experts care to argue whether the AE or BE spelling is correct?

John

It's ergonomist

I'm surprised this one hasn't surfaced yet:

ISSUES

Everything these days is an 'issue'. No-one has 'problems' anymore, it's always 'issues'. For example:

"I have issues with this."

"Do you have any issues?"

"We need to address these issues NOW."

"If you have any issues, please let me know."

John

I've just read this whole thread (in an attempt not to repeat anything). What a laugh!

I can add some that annoy me:

1 "Burglarise"

I hear this increasingly frequently on US (and British) television. Burglar is a noun derived from the perfectly acceptable verb to burgle. So why on earth add a syllable to make a new verb? "Hospitalise", ugly though it is, I can accept as there is no adequate word that sums up the phrase "take to hospital", but "burglarise" is simply self-defeating laziness. All the more annoying if a ZED is used.

2 "Effectively"

When the speaker means "in effect". The two are not the same and the language is in danger of losing a very useful adverb in the process.
Once the Prime Minister used the phrase "We have started to effectively wage war". The only way effectively to wage a war is to win it. And he (John Major) split an infinitive to boot*. Tosser.

3 "Hopefully"

Again, a perfectly useful adverb being stripped of its meaning. "Hopefully they are praying" means that they are praying with hope, not that it is to be hoped they are praying.

4 "Target"

Is not a verb.

5 "Aitch"

Is how it is spelled. Not with an initial "h".

I'm with someone on the "schedule/skedule" thing. It's the former, I learned that at shool. Brian's invention of "twunt" is inspired. New words are great and language needs to evolve, Shakespeare introduced some 300 words into the language including "obscene" and "leapfrog".

Finally, a witticism from the late, great Douglas Adams. "W.W.W. is the only abbreviation in the English language that takes three times longer to say than what it's short for. Nine syllables instead of three."

Missing you already.

Rod

*I am well aware of the origin of this erroneous linguistic rule, but it's what I was taught...

quote:

---

Originally posted by rodwsmith:
Brian's invention of "twunt" is inspired.
Rod

---

It's a great word, but although I am fantastic, I can't take the credit for that one. I think it was probably introduced here by Matthew "Voice of Reason" Robinson, via The Grauniad.

I also get a kick out of the way language develops, especially where it concerns new sweary wordies.

Brian OReilly

How noble of Brian not to take the credit. You are clearly not a twunt of any description.

But this thread has got me going, and the article I was supposed to write today is still, er, embryonic.

Two more that pi*s me off:

"Less / Fewer"
You can have less cake (singular) but fewer cakes (plural). How difficult is that to comprehend?

"None"
This is a contraction of "not one" and is always singular. None of the new crop of BBC newsreaders is aware of this, apparently.

Things such as the above annoy me far more than clichés. These, after all are only turns of phrase that have become overused, usually by virtue of being popular. "At the end of the day" is no more or less meaningful than "when all's said and done" the former being one of today's more annoying clichés, whilst I suspect the latter was equally annoying once. At least they convey what the speaker is trying to say.

All this semantic stuff sounds like pedantry, but since the anglophone people of the world (some more than others) appear to expect and/or demand that everyone else on the planet be able to speak our language, I feel it is grossly unfair of us not to learn and adhere to the basic rules of grammar. These make learning a foreign language considerably easier (which is why many Scandinavians speak English so much better than most British people do). It is the least we can do. Our collective unwillingness to learn other languages is nevertheless appalling.

Rant over.

"Our collective unwillingness to learn other languages is nevertheless appalling."

I think that applies to learning our own language as well

I think "twunt" was originally coined by genius comedian Chris Morris on the TV series "Jam". It's widely used both by the Guardianistas and on Popbitch, Holy Moly, etc. The Guardianistas also use "Cnut" (said "K-noot") as a way of acknowledging that some find the word offensive without having to concede the option of concluding a particualrly nasty argumet with the words "You utter cnut".

It's now widespread enough that it was recently used on a Telewest advert when a Nathan Barley-esque character was seen relaxing in his Hoxditch warehouse flat reading a spoof style magazine called "Twunt".

BTW "Nathan Barley" is now also almost in common usage (at least in thatLondon) to mean a "fuck-haired swaggering cock about town" and comes from Charlie Booker's brilliant TV Go Home.

Matthew

Matthew,

Thank you so much for that - it now has a bookmark on my computer. I have weaned myself off television, but if any of it resembled that, then I'd flog the hi-fi and buy a decent one.

I do admire Chris Morris' work tremendously ("It's Your Blood" from TDT being the funniest single thing I think I have ever seen), but I only remember Jam from the radio, not television, do you know if it is available on dvd?

Thanks again for the link.

Rod

"Jam", "Blue Jam", "Brass Eye" and "The Day Today" are all on DVD now. play.com is probably going to be the cheapest.

Matthew

Talk to the Hand - what's that all about.

Oh and Human Resources. Pah

Human Resources = Attrition Management

Derek

<< >>

"Talk to the Hand - what's that all about"

It comes from a little remembered fish-out-water, RomCom called "Beautician & The Beast" about a Jewish-American beautician who mistakenly gets sent ot a fictional Eastern European country to first clash with and then fall in love with the local King played by (of all people) Timothy Dalton.

The phrase was a running gag in the film, became a minor cultural phenom in the US and then went global when it was used in, I think, an episode of "Friends".

Matthew

quote:

---

Originally posted by Richard S:
"Research shows.."

To justify any old load of cobblers. In the context of lazy journalists who never look at context or such arcane concepts as whether it was peer reviewed.

---

I've been to a couple of 'media training' days with my uni and research council, both run by FT/BBC/New Scientist journos, and they've strongly encouraged us to use 'research shows' language in our press releases. 'Peer-reviewed' is one of the phrases they singled out as meaningless for lay audiences.

Hi all,

John Carter wrote:

>Everything these days is an 'issue'. No-one has 'problems' anymore, it's always 'issues'. For example:

"I have issues with this."<

I was having a 'spirited' argument with an american friend of my wife who eventually said:

"You know, I think you have some issues that need to be examined."

To which I retorted:

"Heh, it's only my issues that define me!"

Best Regards,
Mark Dunn

First of all, there are those expressions used by people too lazy, dumb or unimaginative to think of something to say, eg

Hearts and Minds

Dumbing/dumbed down

War against terror

It's not rocket science

Then there are some really hideous examples of MBA management tosser-speak, such as

Singing from the same hymn sheet

Mission statement

Let's stir fry some ideas in the think wok (yes really)

Customer-focused

Brand-focused

Brand equity

Transport companies who call passengers "customers"

Grrrrr Kevin

"Leverage," or worse "leveraging," are other examples of MBA MTS that I can't abide.

Dan

quote:

---

Customer-focused

---

There's a new one: "customer-facing".

"Powerful", as in "that was a powerful presentation". "Powerful" has now replaced "good". (It seems that all of the "power" words, like "empowerment" are gradually becoming unusable by normal people.)

And one is no longer responsible for a particular issue or project, one "owns" it, along with other "stakeholders".

Ross

I'm certainly not customer-facing at 4.57AM! Nor indulging in "solution-focused thinking". Meaningless marketing slogans fall into this category: "Every little helps" "Trade in the knowledge"