Category: grammar

Words and phrases I hate

August 28, 2019 • 12:30 pm

Beyond the depressing news from Britain (and Matthew has promised to write us a daily summary during the “troubles”), there’s not much I feel compelled to write about today. So let’s return to a favorite curmudgeonly pastime: describing words and phrases that rankle us. I have three today:

A.) “This. Just this.” This phrase is used to agree with or emphasize some statement or sentiment. (Sometimes it’s just the single sentence “This.”) The word is the verbal equivalent of an emoticon: a cheap and not particularly appealing way to express assent. For some reason it seems widely used by Social Justice Warriors (and I am referring to the offense-brigade type) to align them selves with a group that is distancing itself from others.

B.) “because why not” or “because. . “ I don’t like this because it’s ungrammatical, and that alone is enough to rile me. I’ll give an example: “Why did you eat your hamburger but leave the bun?” “Because carbohydrates.”  And that’s one of the less disturbing examples. An article at Sentence First goes into more detail on why and how “because” has become a preposition, including this:

‘Because’ has become a preposition, because grammar

If the title of this post made perfect sense to you, then you’re way ahead of me. But just in case, we’d best recap. Neal Whitman wrote a good article at Grammar Girl recently on the possible origins of because as a standalone preposition. This helpful passage from Whitman sets out the context:

In Standard English, the word “because” can be used two ways. One of them is to introduce a clause, as in “Aardvark was late because he was waiting for the repairman to show up.” Used this way, “because” is a subordinating conjunction. The other is to team up with “of” to form what’s called a compound preposition. For example, “Aardvark was late because of heavy traffic.” In the past three or four years, though, a new usage for “because” has been developing.

The new usage – older than 3–4 years, mind – is what Laura Bailey and Mark Liberman, respectively, have referred to as “because+noun” and “because NOUN”. Liberman says the idiom usually seems to imply “that the referenced line of reasoning is weak”. Sometimes, yes, but it’s also commonly used just for convenience, or effect: No work tomorrow because holidays!; Of course evolution is true, because science.

Because X is fashionably slangy at the moment, diffusing rapidly across communities. It has a snappy, jocular feel, with a syntactic jolt that allows long explanations to be forgone. Because time-strapped. Maybe the causal factor is so obvious as to need no elaboration, or the speaker is distracted or giddy, or online and eager to save effort and move on, or maybe the construction appeals for undefined aesthetic or social reasons.

Anything that’s “fashionably slangy” is suspect from the outset! (Which reminds me: “outset” is not the same as “onset”, yet many people use the latter when they mean the former.)

C.) “Impactful.” There is no use for this word. “Meaningful,” “consequential”, “important”, “effective”, or, best of all, “influential.” With all of those words, there’s no need for the clumsy and bothersome “impactful”.  But of course HuffPost loves it:

You know the drill: go ahead and rant:

Words and phrases I hate

August 15, 2019 • 2:30 pm

The list keeps growing so fast that I can barely contain my bile.  Here are a few stinkers that have bothered me lately. (And of course, add your own in the comments.) All examples come from that bastion of grammatical degeneracy: HuffPost.

1.) “noms” for nominations. This is one of those “look cool” truncations like “fam” for family or “romcom” for “romantic comedy”. The problem, of course, is that the word also means “food” to all Internet cat lovers. Why can’t they just say “nominations”?

2.) “vacay” for “vacation”. This one really ticks me off, as you save only one lousy syllable. Does this mean that “vocation” will become “vocay”, too? And it’s only a matter of time before “fashion” becomes “fash”.

3.) “relatable“.  When I hear someone use or write this word, I immediately mark them down on the neuron scale. I’m not sure why it bothers me so much (it may even be in the dictionary), but somehow the longer phrase “that we can relate to” seems better. Or, better yet, what’s wrong with “congenial” or “appealing”?

4.) “advancements”.  What the bloody hell? Why isn’t “advances” good enough?

 

Don’t worry—I have more. And I’ll be here all year, folks.

More words and phrases I hate

July 11, 2019 • 1:15 pm

It’s that time of year when the heat makes one splenetic, ready to denounce phrases used by the young, woke, or “with-it”.  Here are a few of my most despiséd terms, and of course you’re welcome to add yours.

It’s time for the Daily Two Minutes of Hate!

1.) “Back in the day”.  Of course this means “way back when” or “in old times that I remember”, but it’s annoyingly imprecise. When I hear it I want to ask, “In WHAT day? When?” It seems easier to say, “When I was a child” or something similar.

Example from boston.com:

He’s a resilient guy, this Conan O’Brien, and now he’s rising from the ashes again, re-re-re-bearded and ready to puppet dance, hoping to promote his C-SPAN3 show by making guest appearances on everything from CNN’s “Spitzer Blagojevich’’ to “The Daily Show With Dennis Miller.’’ But we’ve known O’Brien is a fighter since back in the day, when he was the David to Jay Leno’s Goliath.

2.) “Passed” for “died”.  This, of course, is a euphemism designed to avoid the word “died” or even the notion that someone is gone for good. Further, it implies that there’s an afterlife: that somebody passed on the way to somewhere else. We need to face up to the fact that everyone is going to die, but one way to deny that is to use words like “passed”. Now I don’t call out people for using that about someone they knew, as that would be churlish, but it still curls the soles of my shoes when I hear it.

“Passed away”, however, is better and doesn’t rankle nearly so much.

3.) “Salty”. I can’t tell you how much I despise this word, which, according to the Urban Dictionary, means “when you are upset over something little.” Alternatively: “The act of being upset, angry, or bitter as result of being made fun of or embarassed. Also a characteristic of a person who feels out of place or is feeling attacked.”

Here’s one example by a social-media-savvy Congressional representatives who is trying to be cool (note the Spanish—an attempt to show solidarity with her equally vocal sister).  I also can’t stand the “sorry not sorry” phrase, which is odious but should at least have a comma or semicolon after the first word:

4.) “It is what it is.” (I’m sure I’ve highlighted this before.) A friend said this the other day and I said, “What does that mean?” The response: “You can’t do anything about the situation.” But often that’s not the case, and if that’s true then the phrase devolves to a watered-down version of Vonnegut’s “so it goes.” In other words, it’s a conversational place filler meant to make you sound cool.

Your turn!

“Gender reveal parties”: a gross misnomer

June 22, 2019 • 12:15 pm

All of a sudden, “gender reveal parties” are all the rage. I read about them everywhere, but at first didn’t know what they were: I thought that they were affairs in which adults who had changed gender, or realized their gender, revealed this to their friends and family. But noooo, here’s what they are, as characterized by Wikipedia:

A gender reveal party is a celebration where either the guests, the expecting parents, or both find out the sex of the baby. This has become possible with the increasing accuracy of various technologies of prenatal sex discernment. For example, less than half way through the normal pregnancy, an ultrasound technician can visually determine the sex. If the parents decide they want to have a gender reveal party they will notify the technician before hand so they won’t tell them during the appointment if they want to be surprised. There is also an early sex blood work exam that can be done as early as 7 weeks with 95 percent accuracy. Gender reveal parties will typically be held midterm so that the first trimester is surpassed and the chances of Miscarriage are low.

Nota bene: it is sex that is revealed.

Parents magazine even has a how-to guide on how to throw such parties (hints: no pink or blue themes before the reveal), and the Wall Street Journal, predictably, has decried the excesses of such parties.

But my point is not whether such parties are good or bad. It’s that they are completely misnamed. We all know—though three evolution societies apparently do not—that there’s a difference between sex and gender. Sex is a biological feature, based on sex-chromosome constitution (in humans, XX vs XY) and accompanied by characteristic traits such as genitalia, testes, and ovaries. It’s almost completely binary, with very few intermediate or undiagnosable cases (I’m talking to you, evolution societies).

In contrast, gender is, as they say, a “social construct”, and corresponds to a person’s sex “role” or self-identification. Thus, a biological male can be a self-identified female in gender, someone can identify with both genders, often using the pronoun “they”, or there can be people who assume genders that don’t involve either male, female, or a mixture. As I’ve repeatedly said, while biological sex is a binary, gender, while also fitting a bimodal distribution (most people identify as either male or female) is a bit less of a binary, since there are more self-identified intermediates. And there’s no reason not to respect people’s self-identification.

But let us have no nonsense about “gender reveal” parties. It is not the fetus’s gender that is revealed, but its sex. The parties are revelation of one prong of a binary: male or female. No hermaphrodites are revealed, nor any “genderqueers”, “neutrals”, “pangenders”, or any of the other 58 genders listed here.

Gender is a role or an identity that you adopt after you’re born, usually well after. It can’t be revealed before birth.

And so the parties should be called “sex reveal parties.” QED

Why do they use the “gender reveal” term? I have two theories, both of which which are mine:

1.) “Sex reveal parties” sound too much like parties in which people flash their genitalia.

2.) “Gender” is a more woke and trendy-sounding term than “sex”. Naming a party with “gender” shows that you’re cool. That, however, leads to the misnomer identified above.

If you’re gonna have one of these parties, for Ceiling Cat’s sake get it biologically correct!

The most repugnant headline ever

May 20, 2019 • 5:00 pm

It’s from HuffPo, of course, and I count 4.5 repellent words or phrases in the  two headlines below. If you click on the screenshot, you’ll see another stinker in the second-page headline:

Apparently this is the way HuffPost thinks its readers talk, and perhaps they do.

And of course it’s about a tweet: that’s all that HuffPo reports on these days since its “reporters” are too lazy to do anything but look at Twitter.

More words I hate

May 19, 2019 • 1:45 pm

It’s time for another installment of “words and phrases that repel me”. Today we have four, and I’ll use as examples my favorite website to hate, HuffPost. (Click on screenshots to see the shameful usage.)

1.) Impactful.  I’m not even going to look this up to see it’s a word; it probably is in the OED or some place similar. But it’s odious, repugnant, and odiferous. Yes, I know it’s shorter than the alternatives, though some adjectives, like “effective” can occasionally replace it. It sounds awkward.

2.) Dragged.  As in “throw shade on”, meaning, “criticized” or “vilified”. It’s with-it millennial jargon, and it’s also confusing, for those who don’t know its use in the argot might think that someone is literally being dragged. (And don’t get me started on “literally”.)

3.) Haters. To shut down discussion of any topic, just refer to critics or opponents as “haters.” Nobody wants to be a hater, and it’s a good way to mock (even if it doesn’t silence) those whom you don’t like. And no, AOC didn’t “shut down” anybody: as far as I know, the GOP critics of her views are still there. I may have used this word before in a “words I hate” post. I guess I’m a word hater.

4.) Minoritized. This is an example of Orwell’s notion that new words and phrases can be constructed to carry a hidden political message.  It used to be “minorities”, which was accurate in singling out groups that were not in the numerical or political majority. By referring to “minoritized” people, you now add the notion that they have been diminished or oppressed. That may be the case, but sometimes it’s not, and, at any rate, why not use the words “oppressed minorities” or “oppressed” instead?

Now, of course, it’s your turn to vent.