I present two phrases that annoy me when used in either speech or prose, and I encourage readers to add their own.
“At first blush. . .” I heard this on NPR this morning, and, as always, it irritated me (though not as much as Krista Tippett irritates me). It means “without previous knowledge,” or, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (which gives some early usages), this:
I think this usage is both superfluous and pompous. Why can’t you just say, “If you didn’t know better, it would seem that the Pope would be nonviolent,” or something along those lines. When I hear the “blush” part, I always think of a peach.
“Sea change”: All this really means is a “big change”, as in “There’s was a sea change in the attitude towards terrorism after 9/11.” I doubt that people who use it even know its origin. It was in fact coined by Shakespeare in The Tempest to indicate a change actually caused by the sea. Here’s the OED definition:
And the full reference from The Tempest:
“Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.”
But when people use the phrase now, they’re virtually never referring to a change caused by the sea. Rather, they just mean “a change.” If that’s what you mean, just say that, or say, “A big change.” Why bother to add the word “sea,” which adds nothing to what you say except to make you sound smart?
I suspect that even Steve Pinker would approve of this trimming of phraseology, though I haven’t asked him. At any rate, what phrases annoy you?
I absolutely hate the term “ironical.” I know it’s technically correct, but can’t everyone just say “ironic?”
In high school, I used to hate it when calculus students said “derive” instead of “differentiate” to denote taking a derivative.
Something I hear a lot, that always annoys, and now it’s being used a lot even on NPR: “try and” instead of “try to”.
Also, I don’t like the usage “one-off” instead of “unique” (say). When you grab “one off” the production line for quality control, you are hoping it’s typical, not one of a kind. I think saying “one of” would make more sense, but why not use the perfectly cromulent word we already have, i.e., “unique”.
Here’s a physics paper in a major journal with “first blush” in the abstract (why not at first sight, or on initial examination?):
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10701-013-9737-1
Yeah, one of always made more sense to me, too, though I don’t really use it.
I used to consider “try to” the only correct form (except in certain idiomatic phrases like “try and catch me”), but “try and” seems to be more widely accepted among British writers. C. Hitchens, for one, regularly used “try and”; it’s on nearly every page of “Hitch 22.”
Yeah, just try and stop us using that!
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I think “one-off”, “two-off” etc. is used in manufacturing to specify numbers of products or parts produced as distinct from other numbers, such as part numbers or dimensions. I think of parts made by cutting pieces off the end of a length of stock material.
The word “listicle” always annoys me. If you don’t like what someone else wrote, just say so !
That’s a new one on me! What does it mean, exactly?
From the ‘Urban Dictionary’: “An article comprised mainly of a list of something annoying”. See more at :
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=listicle
Usually people use it in a sentence such as “we are given such listicles”, etc.
Oops, guess I could have looked it up myself!
Thank you, I already feel more hep.
Never heard that one either – thankfully.
“comprised of” for “comprising”
The Urban Dictionary seems to be largely written by and for illiterates, but I’ll often find a meaning (or something I can extract a meaning from) there that I won’t find elsewhere.
Well, I’ve gone along using “comprise” completely the wrong way, sigh. Must be due to only registering the incorrect form all my life. Now I’ll have to struggle to remember the right way. Oh, the burden!
But “is comprised of” is quite standard.
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Thx, I’ll stop worrying now. 🙂
One that drives me absolutely crazy is ‘Come together’. It almost always is used in some exhortation like ‘We’ve got to come together and solve this problem.’ What the hell does it mean? Assemble? Meet? Start proceedings? It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard and I keep hearing it over and over again.
Heavens! I can remember when “come together” meant “have simultaneous orgasms” and we thought the Beatles’ new (1969) song of that name was quite risqué.
That’s true! I noticed that it hasn’t completely lost that meaning when the Romantic Comedy starring Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd (which is a sendup of everything from ‘When Harry Met Sally’ to ‘You’ve Got Mail’ was called ‘They Came Together’, which was clearly hinting at that as an ill-considered title for a ‘RomCom’.
Something I absolutely hate, loathe and detest and it makes me cringe every time I hear it, is (NZ) newsreaders’ use of subordinate clauses with no main verb. As in “Extreme weather being experienced in all areas, cars blown off the road in Methven, police warning motorists to stay at home”.
(I scream at my TV ‘where’s the verb???’)
I don’t know if newsreaders in other allegedly-English-speaking countries do this but ours do it all the frickin’ time.
Another NZ news foible is beginning an item with “There’s [abstraction] …”
“There’s anxiety in the Bay of Plenty after cracks were found in the Matahina dam…”
Saves them the trouble of actually finding anyone who’s anxious.
“The existnece of an abstraction is not news!” I want to shout.
Sorry, that should have come from me. I hate WordPress!
Or even worse, memos that start “Concern is expressed…” 🙁
“Outside” as a noun can be followed by “of”, eg “the outside of the house was painted white”. As a preposition it does not need “of”, eg “He went outside the house to play” Same applies to “inside”.
And don’t start me on “off of”.
“Long story short…”
“At first blush”, “sea change”. Both phrases I have never heard before until now. Woo hoo.
Tempest is the second best play by Shakespeare.
Sorry to go off topic, but you drew me in with ‘second best’. 🙂
I’m assuming you consider Hamlet No. 1? I always thought A Merchant of Venice had the second best set of quotable lines (Tempest does indeed have the most). Interesting that in both plays, the best lines often come from women (for example, in Tempest it’s ‘Oh brave new world, etc. and in Merchant it’s ‘The quality of mercy, etc.)
I’d say number of quotations is a poor measure of quality. The Bible gives us many quotations, too. Plot, mood, characters, all contribute. I’m prejudiced towards particular plays by having seen very good productions of them.
How about the number of 1950s sf films based on it?
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I’m way late to this party, but here are my two entries for least favorite expressions:
1. “Tapped” as in “Gowdy tapped by Boehner to lead Benghazi select committee.” What does that word mean? Is it meant conjure images of a game of freeze tag or duck duck goose? Or is it more like creating a small rupture to extract fluids?
2. “Trope” as in “We’ve all heard the old trope that building credit takes time.” A “trope” is a figure of speech in which words are used in non-literal ways. I can accept that the words usage has expanded to mean “narrative stereotype” in literature, but I don’t accept its increasingly common usage as “a fact, argument, policy or theory that I choose to disregard.”
I hate the word calculus used to describe any kind of political or business deliberations.
An adjective (often formed from an abstract noun) used to qualify a noun of the same meaning, I call the American tautology. Perhaps more fairly, the academic tautology.
“foundational support”
“maturational rate of growth”
“too lengthy periods of time”
“functional response”
“Foundational material”
Frederick Crews skewers this in “The Pooh Perplex” (an anthology of literary criticisms, Marxist, Freudian, etc., of ‘Winnie the Pooh”) calling “refutative elenchus” an “elegant phrase”. (elenchus=refuation)
I agree with all of these “a thousand per cent”.
“The thing is is…
“Measurably better…”
That one is a real poke in the eye eye.
TV just reminded me of another – “break down”. From sportscasters to news analysts, they seem to have a need to explain everything to us dolts.
“At first blush” seems like a friendly version of the Latin prima facie.
An analogy: “Begging the question” is a friendly version of the Latin petito principii.
These translations are awkward, and their meanings are more likely than most phrases to denigrate. Both cases involve messy metaphors, hence ‘blush’ takes a little extra cognizing to disambiguate (you could probably test this in a lab if you wanted!)
I often use, “at first glance”; the meaning is far more clear.
Denigrate? “Criticize unfairly; disparage” – Degenerate maybe…!
Denigrate means literally to downgrade by blackening. I’m surprised it’s still acceptable. The people who objected to “niggardly” would have been on firmer ground here.
Denigrate is based on the Latin word for black, niger, which is obviously why we see its derivatives in words referring to people with dark skin. But those uses of the root word came later.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/28/magazine/on-language-dark-words-of-disapproval.html
You get bursts of phrases on Radio 4’s Today programme, that sometimes persist but often fade away after a fasionable moment, such as-
a raft of ideas
fit for purpose
blue sky thinking
clear blue water
etc
…& “of biblical proportions”! WTF!?
“Long story short” irritates me, especially when the story doesn’t appear to have been shortened.
“OMG” and its variations.
When I hear this and that “OMG” uttered by students, likely as not I say out loud, “Oh My Zeus” or “Oh My Wotan.”
I can’t read “OMG” without hearing it in a stereotypical Valley Girl voice.
In his/her DNA
On point
That being said
Leverage
Optics
Just a few; my apologies if these have been previously listed.
In what sense is “optics” being abused?
Has anyone said “incentivize” yet?
One that I’ve heard all too often in the Web Development business is ‘monetize’ (to start making money on a service or feature, or turn a web site into a money-making venture) or the even worse ‘monetization’ (act of monetizing).
Too bad it didn’t become ‘monetizary’ or ‘monetition’.
What’s your objection to that? It’s a succinct way of saying what took you several words to say.
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I guess my objection is twofold: First, it is an ugly word that like so many ize/ise words sounds synthetic and inelegant.
Secondly, the way it is used these days (as I defined above) is actually different from the original meaning, which was to put into circulation as money, as in “We are going to base our economy on a new currency, the quatloo, so we will start monetizing these 10 quatloo notes as soon as they are printed.”
Admittedly, there isn’t as much need for a word in that context (unless you are starting a new nation) as there is in web-speak, but I’m disappointed that the word had to be misappropriated in order to describe the new online activity. Surely we can do better if we put our minds to it.
Let me know what you come up with …
Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse all creative spellings.
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