A few words and phrases I hate

March 23, 2013 • 10:59 am

Addendum: I forgot the near-universal mis-placement of the word “only.” For example, “I only ate one piece of toast” (really? what else could you have done with it?) instead of “I ate only one piece of toast.”

 

First, this one, which I heard on the news:

“The facts on the ground. . .”

Or anything on the ground, including references to troops as “boots on the ground.”

Really? Facts on the ground? Are some facts in the air, while others rest comfortably on Earth’s surface?

The phrase apparently originated as an Israeli diplomatic term denoting a real situation instead of an imaginary one (see Wikipedia), but even there it was ludicrous, for facts are facts and speculations are speculations. But the term has now been co-opted to cover many other things.

Oh, and here’s another: a glaring redundancy that that I often see in scientific review papers as a subtitle of the final section: “Future prospects.”  This of course, is meant to distinguish the author’s predictions from those “past prospects.”

And this one will be banned on this website: “totes” for “totally”. I despise it because it’s meant to make the writer seem cool and with-it, like saying “peeps” for “people.” I wish Orwell were here to excoriate prose like that.

(Maybe I’m becoming one of those old guys who chases kids off his lawn.)

Feel free to comment below on the words or phrases that really annoy you. But don’t defend “totes” or “peeps”!

519 thoughts on “A few words and phrases I hate”

  2. Seems to me that English, as some of us mature folks learned it, is not being taught any more.
    There must be quite a few teachers spinning in their graves…. they taught us how to parse sentences, use proper terms and spellings and held us to standards.
    As someone pointed out upthread, language evolves and there is not much we can do about it…. but it appears that a lot of the peeves we see here are due to sloppiness and inattention.
    Gotten and irregardless would have brought down Miss Curtis’ wrath upon my head!

  3. Such phrases as, “In the year (eg) 2008…” Well, what the hell else would 2008 refer to?

  6. i wonder just how ‘down’ with ‘i can haz moar fudz’ and ‘crib’, referring to a residence, orwell would have been.

    1. If you don’t like my language, there are plenty of other websites to visit. Please go to those instead of here.

      kthxbai

    2. I’m pretty sure Orwell would have expected you to use your Shift key occasionally.

    4. Jeez you must be tone deaf. When Jerry uses those neologisms he does so deliberately, tongue in cheek, not with serious intent and with the full knowledge that they’re ‘wrong’. And we (most of us, anyway) know what he’s doing and are amused by it.
      (He usually does it on connection with kittehs).

      That’s quite different from doofuses who imagine their mangling of the English language is legitimate.

  7. I don’t like the word “film” (in English only). I despise it as much, and for the same reason, as I dislike “nice” wine or a “nice” salad. But maybe it’s the people who drink nice wine while they watch a film that get on my nerves. The words are just the messenger…of their sophistication.

    1. My Grandpa always spoke of going to the fillums, though to my generation they were movies. Apart from that, no idea what you’re talking about.

  8. I’ll have to agree with the late, great George Carlin in his annoyance with the phrase: “The best thing since sliced bread”.

    Really? Nothing noteworthy since the cutting of bread loaves?

  9. It’s particularly vexatious, when I do something very nice for people, and they exclaim to the heavens, “There IS a god!” Huh? How about a simple “thank you!”?

  10. I didn’t see it mentioned, so I’d like to add, “Have a good one.” This phatic expression has become the mother of all irritating expressions. It’s equal to the overuse of the word “like.”

    Have a good one what? You mean day, Or maybe life? Ban them both.

    1. I always thought it referred to jelly roll doughnuts. You want to avoid the stale ones.

  11. My, my, 274 comments and counting. Are there any words/phrases left for use without being annoying to a lot of people here? This post has really struck a chord – actually, I hate that one too. And, actually, ‘actually’ isn’t a word at all! I’ve turned into a curmudgeon.

    1. In another location on the web, I came across a comment thread titled “Phrases That Drive You Nuts”. It’s five years old, has thousands of comments and shows no sign of stopping.

  12. As a general rule, do not use a long word when a short word will do. The main culprit here is the word ‘utilise’. Just say ‘use’ – one syllable instead of three; same meaning (with rare exceptions).

    Everyone has mentioned ‘awesome’, but has anyone mentioned ‘cool’.

    Also people who mention your name in every sentence. I hate that – well, except for that cute little thing down the road. But it’s annoying when they’re total strangers, and especially if they’re trying to sell you something.

    BTW, does anyone object to introducing a sentence with the word ‘well’? I do it all the time and someone did object one time and I’ve been self conscious about it ever since.

    1. All the time? Then, it may be annoying. I work with someone who starts most sentences with ‘so’. He pronounces it like I imagine Ed Sullivan would have. Now that’s annoying. As are exclusionary references.

    3. I work as a customer service representative and we are told we MUST use the customer’s name several times in the conversation ‘to build rapport’. I’m always marked down on my QAs for that one because I find it appalling and only use the name at the beginning and once near the end of the conversation.

    4. I have a rotten memory, and try to repeat a new acquaintance’s name as often as I can, so that I might remember it when I bump in to them later.

  13. I don’t think “only” is misplaced in sentences as Jerry suggests. It associates with focus, not by proximity. So “I only ATE the toast” is of course a silly thing to say, but “I only ate THE TOAST” isn’t. Often you can’t tell except by context in written speech, but in spoken speech, it’s next to impossible to get the unintended reading.

    1. Which is exactly why written language requires more care and precision than spoken language.

      Consider “He said only that he loved her” v. “He only said that he loved her”. You really wouldn’t want to get that one wrong. So put the “only” where it belongs, next to the word or phrase it applies to. Why invite confusion if you don’t have to?

      1. Yes, there are cases where confusion can happen, but Jerry’s case was not one of them. “I only ate one piece of toast” is only misinterpreted by people who have a false view of how ‘only’ works and want to be pedantic about it (if it’s possible to be a pedant about false things).

    2. ‘Only I ate only the only toast’ can be objected to only on the grounds of redundancy it seems, since the last “only”, though meaning something different from the first one, presumably follows from it logically, but only with a few additional assumptions about either your non-regurgitation, or at least about your fellow diners having only non-disgusting habits and there being no pet canines present.

      1. Sorry, not for it being unappetizing, but because I meant to say the first follows from the last, not the other way round.

  14. “Back in the day” is the one that bothers me most. What day? The Third Dynasty of Egypt? The Nineteenth century? The 1950’s? The 1980’s? Last week?

  15. One of the worst for me: using ‘that’ instead of ‘who’ when referring to a person. “The man ‘that’ delivered the furniture.” ‘That’ makes me crazy!

    2. The idea that “who” is for people and “that” is for things is an established convention of grammar, but, although some usage experts continue to recommend against it, “that” has been in use as a pronoun with a human antecedent for a long time, as R.W. Burchfield points out in his lengthy discussion in THE NEW FOWLER’S MODERN ENGLISH USAGE (1996). The OED cites Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif using it this way, and it includes citations from writers in every century since then. So there’s clearly room for exception, and some constructions seem to work better with “that.”

      1. There may be literary licence to do so, especially given your examples. I have also heard “The man ‘what’ …” as colloquial English in the UK. However, ‘that’ is more an American thing in my experience and it just plain sounds rude to me.

  17. One more from me and then I’ll retire for the night: How often are you in a conversation and your counterpart begins a reply with “Yeah, no, I think…” or even “No, yeah, I think…”. I can see the mental wheels turning and am not actually confused by what they mean, but it’s a pretty clumsy use of the language.

  18. Present-day use of “Facts on the ground” to mean “real true facts” as opposed to the other kind- bad .

    But the origin was more specific and concrete than just “a real situation instead of an imaginary one”.

    It meant the policy of building Israeli settlements in the West Bank, so that any claims by the Palestinians would have been countered by creating a new constituency who would fight to keep their new homes.

    “Ground” referred to actual dirt; land claimed by the Palestinians, so as originally coined it had a very clear and relevant meaning.

  19. I hate the ever increasing use of abbreviations on web sites (also blogs) that are used for text messages on cell phones. I don’t understand what most of them mean and if I do learn one I frequently forget it. Consequently, the rest of the sentence or paragraph becomes unintelligible. Besides, some of those abbreviations stand for naughty words one normally doesn’t use in polite company.

    I’m eighty years old and bought my first cell phone only a couple of years ago. I use my phone to talk on, not for texting. I don’t understand where modern technology is going these days.

    1. Not only are the abbreviations irritating, but so also is the snarky indignation of the condescendi who use them when someone fails to understand.

      1. Good point on the ‘pomo’ abbreviation. The use of SoHo and TriBeCa has given rise to hundreds of silly copycats such as NoBo and SoBo here in Boulder.

  20. Usages I hate? Most business jargon, for starters.

    ‘At the end of the day’, ‘going forward’, ‘on board’, ‘results-driven’, I could go on and on..
    I’ll single out particularly ‘In the real world’ which implies your argument is rubbish, based on your ignorance, *I* know what reality is and my statements are therefore correct.
    The mark of an arrogant patronising turkey, IMO.

    And three current mis-usages of what were perfectly good words:
    ‘Workshop’ as a verb (‘Let’s workshop this’)
    ‘Progress’as a verb (‘can we progress the plan’)
    ‘Spend’ as a noun (‘this month’s spend’) – it’s ‘expenditure’ ya semi-literate twit, or at least ‘spending’.
    Businesscreatures almost seem to take pride in mangling the English language. I think they see technical jargon (engineering and computing) and think jargon implies high-tech, therefore the more jargon they use, the more esoteric their money-fondling must be and the cleverer they are.

    [/rant]

    1. Excellent rant, infinite. However, I was once startled to hear, on Radio 4 one morning, some businessman talking about a desired future as, ‘honey in heaven’. I thought, ‘What a beautiful phrase.’

  23. “In order to”, when the language abuser means “to”.

    “In order” in this usage never, ever, ever adds meaning to a sentence… but I see it constantly even in scientific writing.

    1. Which reminds me of unnecessary “reasons”, as in “for safety reasons” rather than just “for safety”.

      And “please refrain from” rather than “please don’t”.

      /@

  24. Bit late (was in pub last night) to join in but “Junk DNA”…

    However, in more general terms, I scream when I hear of “nearly unique” or “three [or more] alternatives”.

    George Orwell provided six basic rules of good writing:

    “Never use a Metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

    Never use a long word where a short one will do.

    If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.

    Never use the Passive where you can use the active.

    Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.[obviously not true when writing scientific papers where technical language is an essential tool of the trade]

    Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

    All major news organisations provide a style guide which should be essential reading for anybody who uses words as part of their lives. I particularly like the Economist’s (from where the Orwell quote above comes from) and the Telegraph’s

    http://www.economist.com/styleguide/introduction

    The Telegraph’s (written by Simon Heffer) is probably more trenchant:

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/about-us/style-book/1435295/Telegraph-style-book-introduction.html

    More Style Guides are here:

    http://grammar.about.com/od/60essays/a/Top-Ten-Online-Style-Guides.htm

    Go read…..

  26. So (ugh!)my gripe du jour (and that is another one, come to think of it) is the use of the word “passionate” by businesses and politicians.

    In 99.99% of cases it’s just so transparently silly.

    “We’re passionate about herring”? “We’re passionate about Ford”?

    Of course you aren’t. If GM were to offer you a bigger commission and a small wad of cash you’d jump ship in the blink of an eye.

    It’s insulting!!!!!!! (Damn: multiple exclamation marks. (Hell, use of the word “multiple”)). Over-use of brackets. Help!!!! I can’t stop.

    1. Reminds me of a commercial we used to have here in the Boston area for a company that was “passionate about basements”!

  27. Describing someone or something as “famous” is usually superfluous. If it is true the reader doesn’t need to be told.

      1. A woman in my birth board (look it up if you don’t know what that is) was apparently a fan of Anne Rice and J.K. Rowling. She named her child “Lucius Lestat”. Poor kid. Another lucky spawnling was named “Orian”. Oh, we can’t forget “Winterberrie”.

    2. Make up names? Well why not? The world would be a duller and more confusing place if everybody was named Dick and Jane.

      1. Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
        Had twenty-three sons, and she named them all Dave?

        1. Comedian and anti-war activist Dick Gregory named his son Dick Gregory (not “Jr,” “the first,” etc.)specifically so that if his son was drafted into the army, he could go in his place. That was a good reason.

      2. Surely, Dick and Jane are both made up names too.

        My own pet hate is the word “surely”, usually used by people who aren’t sure of the statement that follows.

        1. New Zealand doesn’t have an approved list but you may have trouble getting a really silly name registered. Though some slip through… a family court judge made a 9-year-old a temporary ward of the court so she could legally change her name from ‘Tallulah Does the Hula From Hawaii’ to something less absurd.
          http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/25/newzealand

  30. The word which truly annoys me is “leverage”. Why peeps leverage it instead of leveraging word “use”?

  32. I detest the use of “we” when the speaker means “you” as in “Are we ready to order yet?” I’ve learned that waitresses rarely understand the problem if you protest, so I usually seethe silently, but sometimes I can’t resist trying to explain.

    My first exposure to the phrasing no doubt contributes to my detestation. A nurse woke me up early in the morning after surgery to ask, “How are we this morning?” My drug-addled brain couldn’t cope. Even if I knew how she was, which I didn’t, what was I supposed to do, average our states? If so, how? And why was she waking me up to ask this impossible question when I felt so awful?

    (I can’t quite remember if this was the morning before or after a nurse woke me up in the middle of the night to give me a shot to help me sleep.)

    1. Yes, yes, yes! This presumed familiarity drives me nuts. “I didn’t know you were ordering as well — are you going to sit down with us, too?”

      1. I’ve tried that kind of comment. It only confuses them. And it’s all the managers’ fault, anyway. (What can these people be thinking? That we’ll feel more welcome if the waitstaff addresses us like we’re kindergarteners or particularly decrepit patients, or that “we” sounds snooty and will make the chain restaurant seem upscale?!?)

        Now I either seethe silently or explain gently that this misuse of pronouns annoys me like fingernails on a blackboard, and would she, just for me, please use “you” instead of “we”? The the waitress generally indulges the crochetty old bat. Sigh.

  33. I must have exceeded the site comments limit on this one. In my defense, I am avoiding finishing my taxes.

  34. Here are few of my peeves:

    “Take it to the next level”, as if there were some pre-defined “levels” to which one could “take” things.

    “Excellence” as a meaningless business descriptor.

    The conflation of “excited about” and “excited for”. I know prepositions are tricky, but we’re losing the distinction between the object of excitement and a feeling of secondary excitement for someone else’s situation. I can be “excited about” my promotion, and my spouse can therefore be “excited for” me, but it sounds weird for me to say that I am “excited for” my promotion.

    The loss of distinction between “who” and “that”, as in “the person that opened the door had red hair”.

  35. “PERFECT.”

    This word ^^^ has become a ubiquitous reply in the service industries.

    “May I see your boarding pass sir?”
    *hands boarding pass*
    “Perfect.”

    “Ready to order Sir?”
    *yes I’ll have the salmon please*
    “Perfect.”

    “How will you be paying for your shoes today?”
    *I’ll pay with visa*
    “Perfect.”

    And on and on. Sometimes it seems this is the only final response in the vocabulary of every service I encounter.

    Yet when I mention this to anyone else it’s like I’m living in the twilight zone: “oh. really
    I never notice anyone saying that.”

    Please…someone else say they also have noticed this infection of the response “Perfect” into our lives. Or…am I the last sane one left? 😉

    Vaal

    1. All the employees at are local HomeDepot were trained to say “Have a nice day.” Recently, they changed it to “Have a good one!” When all I’d really like to hear is “Can I help you find anything?”

    2. Oh, yes! If meaningful, “Perfect!” would indicate judgement and approval of my choice, and that would be offensive. If meaningless, it doesn’t need to be said.

  36. We usually take measurements starting from zero and going toward whatever an object’s size is. Occasionally, though, I’ll hear someone say that a thing is “twice as small” as something else, and am forced to imagine the measurement starting at some undefined higher number and proceeding downward. Similarly, I’ve encountered folks who say “twice as light” when comparing weights.

    An insidious thing about many of the peeves listed in this thread is that when they are heard or read often enough, even careful people can become infected. I have heard TV journalists, for whom words are the very tools of their craft, use such horrid structures as “three-year anniversary”.

    1. Oh, yes! That one! And three week anniversary is even worse, if that were possible. Which reminds me, whatever happened to the subjunctive? Mostly vanished, I think, or totally mangled, as in “If I would have done that” when “If I had done that” is meant.

  37. It strikes me that a number of the words/phrases mentioned may irk some or all but many of them represent a legitimate pushing of the language envelope, if you will. That they get rejected in the end is OK. Without this, admittedly mostly inadvertent, experimentation, the language would die. Price of admission, I say.

  39. Am I the only one in the world who is irked by “have got”, and “has got”? Isn’t it stupidly redundant,especially in writing? I can deal with it (in small quantities) in speech, and have been known to use it myself facetiously as in, “I has gots to get me one a those!” Let’s lose the word “got” altogether.

  40. It’s hard to read everything, impossible really, so I hope the following two are not just repeating what was already said.

    There is nothing one can do about it, but it seems to me sad that the language is impoverished by people beginning to give yet an additional meaning to a word, and having no need to. My pet example now is “issue”, which meant something substantially different from the word “problem” not very long ago, but not now.

    The unnecessary incorporation of scientific sounding words, presumably but maybe subconsciously to sound profound also bugs me. At present a very common example of this is the adjective “multiple”, when “many” would be perfectly adequate, and far less pretentious.

    On the other hand, I’m sure I commit many sins against the language, and using “which” when “that” would be correct is one I never quite figured out.

  41. I’d love to know the % of “First Annual meetings of XYZ” for which a Second such event never occurs.

    And now, sensing a new opportunity for pretentiousness, they’re transitioning into “First Annual Summit” mode.

    1. Notice how the author of this “Pompous Ass Words” website uses “multiple” twice near the very top, when “many” would both times have been perfectly adequate.

      ‘..glass houses…’ they say, but maybe that metaphor is getting too much use!

  43. I literally detest the misuse of the word literally. “It was so funny I literally laughed my head off”. I wish you bloody well had.

  44. An especially ghastly, pretentious wannabe-trendy one: “[X] is the new [Y]”.

    As in ‘black is the new pink’ or – the most recent one I spotted – ‘fifteen is the new thirty’ (referring in this instance to some 15-minute cooking show, presumably superseding a 30-minute one).

    Doubtless it was original and meaningful the very first time it was used, now it’s annoyingly pseudo-hip and almost invariably cryptic.

    1. I will confess that I occasionally use this sarcastically, especially with the older crowd who seem not to be able to accept the fact that they are old: “Yes, 70 is the new 69.”

  45. A raft of ideas…
    Blue sky thinking…
    Starting EVERY SENTENCE WITH SO! That comes to us from US TV like CSI.

    I disagree about the use of only. That is a matter of stress & a more subtle meaning –
    I ONLY ate ONE piece of toast = I alone was the toast eater, it was just me.

    1. Sorry, when discussing written rather than spoken English, I agree with Jerry. The following four have perfectly clear meanings without unnecessary and ugly emphases added (pardon my pedanticness, or is it pedanticity,
      probably neither, but there seems to be confusion here):

      1. ‘Only I ate the toast.’ What you meant, I think. Not so good, but as long as you add the comma, equivalent to ‘I, only, ate the toast’.

      2. ‘I only ATE the toast.’

      3. ‘I ate only THE TOAST.’ (Equivalently, and better in my non-humble opinion, ‘I ate the toast only’.)

      4. ‘I ate the only TOAST.’

  46. “Think outside the box, or square

    Invariably used by people who have never had an original thought in their entire life

  48. My number 1 pet hate is “Chillaxing”. Somewhat arbitrarily I dislike the word “lush”, for no other reason than how it sounds. Then there’s the “me and John are” rather than “X and I are”.

    There are others, but those make me wish for a grammar hell.

  49. I agreed with you completely sir.

    I despise the tweet-ification of the language.

    I don’t really give a damn if I’m “with-it”. Especially if “with-it” is with stupidity.

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