Words and phrases I detest

September 5, 2025 • 11:30 am

It’s time again to vent our spleens by giving the words and phrases that we find detestable.  Today I have four single words. I know I’ve put at least one of these up before (“fam”), but never mind. There is a theme today: short words or contractions used to make yourself look cool. Here we go (I give examples of each).

1.) Inspo: This is short for “inspiration”, but “inspir” would be better. “Inspo” is in fact so truncated that its meaning is not clear.

Here’s an example I found on my computer’s news site under Tasting Table. It’s about what drinks you should not order at Starbucks because they are complicated for the baristas to make and thus and hold up the line:

Another challenge is that many of these viral recipes include syrups or ingredients that are either seasonal or have been discontinued. Now, add in AI. Some customers walk in with AI-generated inspo scraped from social feeds and get upset if their order isn’t an exact match. These drinks are confusing, hard to memorize, and exhausting.

That word curls the soles of my shoes.

2.) Merch: You all know this one because it’s everywhere, and stands for “merchandise”. Somehow I find it demeaning to sellers. HuffPost, which I no longer read, is a good place to find such “we’re so cool” language. Here’s one article; click to read, though you don’t have to.

 

3.) Fam:  I find this contraction the most offensive of the three. And it came, of all places, from the New York Times food column, recommending a bodega in the invaluable “where to eat” column.  This one hasn’t been posted on the paper yet.  Note that there may be a bit of racist language here, with “we all” perhaps stemming from black English.  But bodegas are a Hispanic site, not a black one.


4.) Mood.  No, this is not the past tense of a cow sound; it is used to mean something like: “Here’s something [usually a feeling] that I can relate to.” Like the ones below.  As Sophie Chew, a lady after my own heart, wrote on yahoo! life,

For example: as I write this, I’m hungry, cranky, and stressed out, but I am also Meryl Streep’s scream in Big Little Lies, a glass of wine on the beach, an obese Golden Retriever, a yawning hippo, Detective Pikachu drinking tea, Elmo shrugging, pink hair, a guy giving the finger, the weather, and a cat in a watermelon.

All of these are moods. Some are even big moods or mood AF, depending on how intensely you’re feeling it.

. . . The term is so liberally applied that while browsing Twitter in the name of research, I came across everything from porn to puppies. When I checked a minute ago, #mood had clocked over 77 million uses on Instagram—not including instances where the term is used without the hashtag.Most frequently, it’s used as an expression of like-mindedness or sympathy. Say you’re scrolling through Twitter on Monday morning and see that your friend has posted a photo of Spongebob being buried alive. You get it immediately. Mood AF, right there.

Ms. Chew gives several examples; here are three:

 

If you want to see 50 of these Gen Z words, go here.

Your turn. Give us the modern language that turns your stomach.

 

82 thoughts on “Words and phrases I detest”

  1. As always, I can’t stand “going forward” (my longstanding bugbear.) It can almost always simply be left out in its entirety without changing the meaning one whit.

    But I’ll add the word “less” to the list. The word itself is perfectly good, but people don’t know how to use it as in: “There were less cars on the road during the COVID epidemic.” My wife and I hear examples of this on the TV news every day. I sit and seethe. She yells out “Fewer!”

    Maybe we should watch less of the evening news. (Or is it fewer of the evening news?)

  2. My bete noir is like, a syntactical fragment that is ruthlessly hammered into any gaps in a sentence where the user is simply too lazy to use the correct word (like I say), or is so bamboozled by the current fads in expression that he/she does not know any better.

  4. Perfect – often used by waitstaff when virtually any order is placed.
    Hey – as a greeting, often used by reporters in the field in response to the news anchor’s greeting. Stick with Good Morning, Good Evening, etc.
    Your call is important – on many a “we’ll get to you sooner or later” recordings.

    ps – I sure do miss the “Subscribe to this Post” option.

      1. Yes, that used to be a great option for keeping up with the comments on a specific post. I googled how to do it, and it seems fairly straightforward.

        thanks

        1. I’ve asked. But at the bottom, under where you make a comment, there’s a box you can tick that says, “Notify me of new posts by email.” Doesn’t that work? (You’d have to leave a comment, though, but that’s ok.)

          1. I believe that is something different, i.e. new posts, not new comments. I already receive all of your new posts by email, but now the only comment box is the one that is specific for only one comment. In the olden days on this website and other WordPress blogs there was a box to check for subscribing to all comments for a particular post. Then it disappeared.

            This is what supposedly can be done to add this option:

            To add a “follow comments” or “subscribe to comments” box in WordPress, enabling users to receive notifications of new comments on a post, the most common and recommended method involves using a plugin.

            To Install the Plugin:
            Navigate to your WordPress dashboard.
            Go to Plugins > Add New.
            Search for the desired plugin (e.g., “Subscribe to Comments Reloaded”).
            Click “Install Now” and then “Activate.”

    2. Re: Perfect. I also originally ran into this response in a restaurant, and at first was puzzled. But, since then, I’ve run into it in other situations where things are less than perfect, or even good. I can’t remember the circumstance right now, but here’s the basic format of what happened:

      Me: Doctor, I’ve been experiencing what I perceive to be excessive rectal bleeding.
      Doctor: Perfect! Now, for how long has this been going on…

      It wasn’t that awful, but you get the idea.

  6. I’m glad to say most of these words I never come across except in your series of “words and phrases” posts. It would be interesting to re-visit these posts after, say, ten years, to see how one still felt about them. Possibly, some have endured, or even seem less objectionable that they originally did. But I suspect most would simply have sunk without trace, happily to annoy us no more.

  7. Inspo fam merch? Two T’s, twenty dollars. Mood.

    I was allergic to slang even when young. I might hate acronyms even more.

  8. “Un-alive” for “kill.” I know it started because you’re not allowed to say “kill” on TikTok, but carrying it over onto other platforms annoys me. It’s so cutesy and it can be wildly inappropriate, depending on the context. “The Nazis un-alived a bunch of Jews.” It makes me want to scream.

    1. Gawd yes. That’s one I hate, too. It sounds like baby talk and gives the impression that, while I’m perfectly capable of watching a YouTube documentary on the Holocaust, I get fwightened by Bad Mean Words “kill” and “murder” and “dead” and need “unalive” to make me think maybe they all just went to sleepy town forever somehow.

  9. For starters, when referring to people, I can’t stand the relative pronoun “that,” as in “people that” when it should be “people who.” “Looking forward,” I am thus far grateful to not yet have to endure hearing for example, “to that” or “from that” as compared to “to whom” or “from whom.”

    I’m reminded of a church matron some years ago critiquing the wording of The Lord’s Prayer, adamantly asserting that it should be, “Our Father, WHO art in Heaven,” not “WHICH art in Heaven.”

  10. I think “merch” is a fine word, if used in a derogatory sense. To me, it means merchandise that is mostly crap.

    I have no idea what “fam” means.

    And “mood” is also a good word, just not in the usage shown. One can be in a good mood, or a bad mood.

    (Not a native English speaker, so perhaps my opinions don’t count for much.)

    1. I agree. As in “Alligator Alcatraz merch”: stuff put out to promote something. (Yes, they have merch).

  11. My two bits:

    “Trans” anything related to gender woo. There’s no such thing. It’s like introducing Lord Xenu and thetans into a conversation. The term only has meaning for the cult who invented it. Hearing broader society use the term normalizes the cult.

    “Gender identity”. For which there’s as much evidence as there is for a soul or the kraken.

    “Gender affirming care”. As if sterilizing healthy kids and/or cutting off their genitals is in any way “care”.

    1. Agreed absolutely. To which I’d add “transphobic” (applied to any belief that deviates from the dogma of the cult) and “misgendering” (which should be replaced by the – usually more accurate – “mistergendering”).

  12. As someone who produces legal transcripts for a living, I hear all kinds of jargon, verbal tics, everything. I went back to university at the age of 50 15 years ago to get a master’s in history. It was a fairly short-lived experiment. They were speaking a different language in every possible way. That’s where I first came across my most hated phrase: let’s unpack that.

  14. “Veggies”. Way too cutesy. It sounds like a marketeer’s attempt to make them appealing to the kiddos. Be a grownup and say it: “vegetables”.

    1. I hear it mostly as annoyingly cheerful vegans trying to proselytize their unappetizing and unfilling food on us. On a long-weekend backpacking trip during college, the leader and, importantly, meal planner, was so excited about all the veggies in our rations he had us simmering away in various pots — for dinner, no less — that I never wanted to hear the word again. You can keep bears away from bacon with a little knowledge. Every canoe-tripper knows how. But no-o-oo! My first boss called people like that “the holies and the hairies”, aka the wool socks and Birkenstocks brigade.

      “Veggies” is simultaneously too cutesy and too cultish. I’m still traumatized.

    2. Paul’s explanation about “veggies” reminded me of another word that sounds “off” to me: “kiddos,” particularly when referring to kids in general — and especially kids to whom one isn’t related. I guess that’s because my dad sometimes called me “kiddo” when I was a child, as a term of endearment. That personal, individual use feels right to me. So now when I think of some parent, say, surveying a playground and referring to the “kiddos,” it feels out of place. Anybody else react that way to “kiddos”?

      And don’t get me started on “doggos”! 😀

      1. Yes! I react the very same way to adults referring to kids they aren’t related to as “kiddos”. It sounds inappropriate and stupid.

      2. Yes, I do, too.
        The female gender-affirming pediatrician referred to her little patients as kiddos in Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman? That little penis is enough to make this kiddo a boy? was the roughly remembered reference. This might be a pediatrics thing generally — the discipline is nearly all female today — but I agree it creeps me out, too.

        If I was teaching medical students I’d tell them not to do it, for exactly the same reason you raise. To me it’s a boundary violation.

    3. Or the British “veg”. Sounds like they’re talking about a person.

      And from a different angle, how about “I’m just going to veg out”?

  15. As an ex-chemist, I object to the prefix ‘cis-‘ being bandied around as the all-purpose antithesis to ‘trans’ in the Kultur Wars.

    An oral tic that I have increasingly noticed is speakers inserting an unnecessary ‘yes’, or ‘so, yes’, or sometimes ‘no’, into their sentences. It is as if they are seeking to self-validate whatever it is that they’re on about.

    I naturally also agree with all the comments above, especially ‘merch’, ‘fam’, and above all the hideous ‘un-alive’.

    1. Related to that use of “yes” or “so, yes”: “Right?” following an assertion, sometimes a wild assertion. (“So, as we know, two plus two equals five, right?”) Fine when used sparingly for emphasis, but at the end of nearly every other sentence? … No! Not right!

  16. Not a word, but I absolutely LOATHE it when people say “on accident”. Ugh. It makes my skin crawl.

    1. There does seem to be something rather arbitrary about the prepositions we attach to certain ideas or concepts. For example, if “on purpose” is proper, why do we say, “by intention” and “by design,” even though they all mean basically the same thing?

      That’s not a criticism of your criticism. Just something I’ve always been curious about.

      1. I hadn’t noticed this about prepositions attached to ideas or concepts, only about prepositions attached to direction and place. With those it seems to be the simplest prepositions which cause university students the most trouble: at, by, for, in, on, to. Prepositions involving time don’t seem to be affected.
        But Jon’s example of “on accident” is especially hideous!

  17. One that drives me a little crazy is “to revert back” you either revert or you go back. If you do both then I assume you have done a complete 360 and are going forward.

    1. Your comment reminds me of “focus in” on something. Why not simply say “focus”? Whether one focuses “in” or “out,” the idea is to get a clear image (or understanding).

  18. My own, old guy pet peeve is the new meaning of “drop”. It used to mean something like “cancel” or “quit” as when I would hear a student say “I am going to drop organic chem…..”. Now it seems to mean “appear”, as in “Taylor Twit’s new record drops on Tuesday!” It can get confusing sometimes.

  19. Of your four examples I am familiar with only “merch.”
    Was it in the Archie comic strips where I used to see “natch” for naturally? Actually, I kind of like it.
    Other irritants: misuse of hone for home, as in honing in on a solution; beginning every other sentence with “so”; “awsome” to refer to the most commonplace things;and the overworked trope (yes, NY Times, I am indeed looking at you) “What could go wrong?” in a headline coming directly after a proposed activity guaranteed to come a cropper. Oh, also pronouncing warranty as warran-Tee, asterisk as asterick, and short-lived with a short i.

  20. “Tick tock” used to mean chronology. I have heard at least one expert use it this way repeatedly on CNN/MSNBC; sounds like a toddler.
    “Me and so-and-so” used as the subject of a sentence. Used everywhere by the younger generation. Even on national TV no less!

  21. “Un-housed”! One of the woke terms. If someone does not pay rent for nine months then trashes the place on the way out, no, they are not un-housed. I’ll leave it to the struggling small time landlord I spoke to last week that was in the hole $30k in lost rent and damages to come up with a better description for someone who does that.

    “Thinking outside the box”….if someone wants to describe creating thinking, they shouldn’t use a cliche.

    “Honestly…”, or “To be honest…” What, are you usually lying? These drive me nuts!

    “I was just about to say….” Well, why didn’t you then?

  22. OK. One more: “passed” for died, as in: “I was hoping to see him one more time before he passed.” Not terrible, but “passed” doesn’t really make death any less permanent.

    1. I agree, but we seem to be a vanishingly small minority. Passed (esp. “passed on”) makes it seem like the deceased has moved along to somewhere else, which may be why some find the word less direct. “Shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisible” is a bit of a mouthful.

    2. From the musical “1776” regarding “passing”: the secretary of the Second Continental Congress is taking roll, and calls out “Rhode Island.” A member says, “Rhode Island has gone to the privy.” The absent-minded secretary (this is pulled on him every meeting) responds, “Very well then; Rhode Island passes,” resulting in considerable guffawing from the members.

  23. “That’s not inside my wheelhouse”

    I better stop…I’m getting annoyed just think about all the sayings that annoy me.

  24. Agree on all of PCC(E), even the ones I didn’t know or detest yet… until now.

    Agree with most suggestions except the youtube vocab. I quite like “unalived” “Prawn” (for porn) Graped for S.A., Snazzies for Nazis. They’re real words, in context and highlight the stupidity of censorship policies.

    D.A.
    NYC

  26. My problem is that “whom” and “nor” are disappearing from the English language. More and more, I’m seeing “who” where before it was “whom”, as in “by who”, and “or” where it used to be “nor”, as in “neither…or” instead of “neither…nor”.

  27. “Gutting,” as in gutting a program or a budget. Any budget cut is invariably described as “gutting.” Sometimes even a smaller budget increase than is desired is described as “gutting.”

  29. “Unpack”. I am late to the show today because I have spent much of the afternoon reading through “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: dismantling racism in math instruction”. A product of schools of education richly funded by bill and melinda gates. While densely illustrated with a word salad of empty and often undefined verbiage, one word that popped up throughout was “unpack”. I think it simply means looking at the content of something but is used in such a way to imply the author’s authority. In any case I hate it almost as much as I hate ai.

    1. I forgot about this one. Ugh! Reach out and deep dive, too. And who remembers “rad,” which went uncool 15 minutes after it was first uttered.

  30. “On the ground.” As opposed to flying over in a helicopter? No, just meaning “there,” as opposed to “somewhere else.”

    But worst of all: “facts on the ground.” As if facts were concrete, physical entities, like rocks or turnips.

  31. “Cali” for California. Cali is a city in Colombia.

    “Epicenter” for center. The “epi” is NOT an intensifier.

    Fortunately, I think the use of “going forward” is declining. Perhaps it has “jumped the shark” (whatever the hell that means).

  32. “At the end of the day,” when used more than about once in any written or oral communication.

  33. I do not like to hear people use “anti” when the mean “counter”. Antiracist is a trendy term these days, but usually used by people who are just racist against different groups.
    Sometimes, the antiracist people can even be heard screaming traditional racial slurs at Black folks who have differing political views.

  34. I dislike “merch” too. I’m fine with “mood,” when used humorously.

    I hate “marginalized” used to refer to a minority group. And I really, REALLY hate “oppressed” used by global Westerners to describe people in the West. There are people in this world who are actually oppressed. The word shouldn’t be cheapened by overuse.

  35. I find it annoying when co-workers announce “I have to pee.” I work with one woman who is constantly announcing this; for variety, she’ll sometimes yell “I’ve got to go. I’m going to pee my pants.” A young man where I work recently said “I’ll be right back; I have to drop a dookie.” These people overestimate their co-workers’ interest in their bodily functions.

    One young woman I was supervising asked me “Can I pee?” I said “Unless you have some strange medical condition.”

  36. No one has mentioned ‘literally’ yet? Its use by most people as an intensifier is one of the worst cases of abus de langage in contemporary culture.

    2. I think the same can be said for “actually,” as in, “I was ACTUALLY there.” Well, if you were there, you would certainly have to ACTUALLY be there, eh? Is “actually” used just in case others just can’t believe that one “was there”? (I remember some self-absorbed prof on a podcast making sure to twice tell listeners that he ACTUALLY visited Antarctica.)

      On a short hike with a couple of other people I picked up a mouth guard I gather was left by a bicyclist. I picked it up by the handle, not the actual mouthpiece. One of my associates said, “I can’t believe you picked that up.” I did not reply in order to “Keep The Peace” and maintain congenial good terms with all. (I’m getting sick to the back teeth of having to do that.) I wanted to respond, “Well, since you can’t believe it, it surely must not have happened.” Who am I to presume to pick up any litter on a trail? (I’ve kept that mouthpiece. Perhaps I’ll one day wave it under my presumptuous interrogator’s nose.)

  37. I always wait for these and I always miss them when they’re fresh.

    Enormously weary of Iconic. Could we find a few more adjectives? How about Famous, for one?

    Also, there’s Football. In the context of sports coverage. I have no use for the game but I’m occasionally in earshot of one either either a game being broadcast or one being talked about. “He throws the football…” “He’s leaving the football field.” Really? WTF other kind of ball would be discussed during a football game. Are the people watching/listening so brain-dead that they can’t remember what kind of ballgame is going on??

  39. I recently listened to Glenn Loury interview another economist on his podcast. She was most prone to using “like” and “kind of” on average every third sentence. Such academics don’t use such locutions when writing because no competent editor allows it.

    In a strong field, the worst I’ve heard thus far:

    “I was SO kind of over it.”

    “It was incredibly incredible.”

    Finally, how about “normie”? What is the opposite – “un-normie” or “non-normie”? “Eccentric” or “weird”? (Says who?) And I’m getting tired of “creepy.”

  40. Apart from “per say”, “effect” (verb) for “affect”. The latter is literally becoming a lost cause.

    “… has no place in our society” <- How fatuous, it obviously has.

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