Words, usages, and phrases that annoy the shit out of you...

Four Words: Use Other Words Please
"Use other words please."
Commonly used phrases that inexplicably bug you
Most irritating cliche/phrase/expression
"Taking Things to a Whole `Nother Level!"
words that annoy
Words that should earn the author a slap
PROVERBIAL and other tip offs to poor writing

-- caitlin (wpsal...) (webmail), December 23rd, 2003. (caitlin)

Oh yes, yes yes. I second that one. And the people who say it, say it over and over.

I also have a horror of people who write prolifically in all caps.

This is true.

But, this is a topic that should be dealt with routinely and harshly... the only way we can correct the language and suppress it's organic growth is by exposing and banning every new usage as it occurs... Isn't that what the French do?

Also: 'fridge,' girls who refer to each other as 'girl,' proactive...i'll be back when i think of more....

'poetic justice'. Used by the lazy to describe all 'justice' the speaker approves of, instead of a particular type. The adjective is rendered meaningless.

Agree re 'bird' for woman/girl, and lament its threatened return. Stinks of 'I'm being un-PC, where's my medal?'. Also the C-person uses it, which kinda ends the argument.

Wait, huh? Fridge is the thing you put food in, whats wrong with it?

I'm picturing him saying things such as "Would you like me to remove another beverage from the refrigerator for you, whilst we watch some association football?"

“three more sleeps until holibobs”

Unnecessary twee Millennial-coded baby talk.

Holibags I've heard of... and that's bad enough.

We did in fact cover this six years ago itt:

holibobs

― meaulnes, Sunday, 9 June 2019 16:23 (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

holibags > holibobs

(Never heard of holibobs tbh)

― John Harris is a Guardian columnist (Tom D.), Sunday, 9 June 2019 18:23 (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

never heard of holibags; heard of holibobs from middle-class English people only.

it's hideous and twee but kind of admirably joyful.

― quelle sprocket damage (sic), Sunday, 9 June 2019 19:14 (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Holibags seems to be Scottish, and possibly Irish.

― John Harris is a Guardian columnist (Tom D.), Sunday, 9 June 2019 19:54 (six years ago) bookmarkflaglink

First mentions on ILX:

@Amelle_berrabah fabulous bkinis, beach babe! Enjoy the rest of your holibobs!
1:18 PM Jan 8th from web

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 19 January 2010 14:55 (sixteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

went full nazi for nov to dec and combined it w/gym, just so I could ~indulge~ a bit over the holibags

fully intend to get back on the bike and go full nazi again in '11 tho

― cozen, Monday, 27 December 2010 17:27 (fifteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

... latter is from the rolling nutrition nazis 2010 thread, in case anyone gets the wrong idea.

So, around the time of the Platty Jubes?

course since the panny d and the cozzie livs everyone here's having a menty b

While we’re here “nutrition nazi” is a deeply terrible term

It probably sounded better when there weren't actual nutrition nazis in government

It did not

Well, less worse. Like a 1/10 going down to a 0/10.

I would like to revive that thread, but with a find/replace word intervention

diet supremacist?

are normal ppl regularly on a street/local whatsapp? i'm aware of nextdoor, which seems similarly nightmarish but at least easier

"pre-loved" has been a thing here (UK) for many years. Books, clothes, etc.

still not over this! how much can you love stuff you're trying to sell? absurd

normal people are online, you just can't see them because they aren't posting spurious enraging nonsense 24/7

okay i guess

I don't think Nextdoor is as much of a thing outside the US but could be wrong.

A lot of neighbourhood whatsapp groups date back to the pandemic, when knowing your neighbours suddenly took on a different urgency.

Yeah that's when ours started and it is mostly benign/helpful stuff, including arranging a collection for the local food bank. Thanks David Cameron's big society!

its just a whatsapp group with some people you have some link to

ours this week for instance is mainly about making sure theres water in the adjacent field for a horse that has been dropped in there for a few weeks without any sign of ownership

things crop up

ours this week for instance is mainly about making sure theres water in the adjacent field for a horse that has been dropped in there for a few weeks without any sign of ownership

The one advantage of our area becoming increasingly built up is that there's less of this shit.

ah hes haopy enough tbh its an ideal spot for him

Re "influencer" a week ago...at a rep screening of A Hard Day's Night today and had to laugh at this (in reference to that agency's "model teen"):

She's a trendsetter. It's her profession.

I hope she was able to monetize her trendsetting. I hope her trendsetting trended.

"job lot"

I think I just hate the way these two short words sound next to each other

jaw blot

That’s how hear it

That’s thanks to the MOP, the maximum onset principle.

occasional/past ilxor Nitsuh explores the current horrible usage of the term "POV", something that drives me up the fucking wall

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/magazine/pov-gen-z-linguistics.html

this past weekend I was part of a discussion about the best gummy bears and pictured many of you cringing at the repeated use of "chew" as a noun e.g. "Haribo have a better chew than Swedish fish"

is that a noun ....im not a grammacist

fun article but a missed opportunity to really understand what "incorrect usage" is. ambiguity and distortion are often language use goals not flaws to be eliminated, and efficiency is consistently ranked way higher in importance than it deserves to be. a language that was maximally concise and always correct (which actually means unchanging) would make life a joyless existential horror.

it's not that criticizing incorrect usage is futile, it's that incorrect usage is like a rainbow, delightful evidence of underlying animating forces of human language. it should be reverentially celebrated like oceans or mountains. it's the fulcrum of the lever made visible. take it away and you don't have a lever anymore, you have a stick.

In this case isn't the underlying force simply that lots of people didn't know what a term meant and misattributed it to another, wider aspect of what they were seeing? So all that's happened is specificity is lost - I can't see what is gained in its place.
Funnily enough I participated in studies sort of on this as a grad - giving children novel nonsense names to objects and seeing how/what they extrapolated to other objects either fitting the term or not.

In this case isn't the underlying force simply that lots of people didn't know what a term meant and misattributed it to another, wider aspect of what they were seeing?

yes. but the error is characterizing that process as "misattribution". that presupposes that some objective frame of reference exists for "correctness" in a language and it does not. I've mentioned before on here that for most people the implicit model of a language is that a perfect version exists somewhere (hand-waving) out there and each person who speaks it has an imperfect copy that can bear some improvement. but the reality is that the phenomenon is entirely bottom-up, not top-down. a language is just a seething mass of idiolects, ultimately one to a person, that are mutually intelligible enough plus socially desirable/useful enough to treat as one language in certain contexts.

usage being the driver of language is not one side of some argument about who gets to decide what a word means, it's the reality of human language. the meaning of any single word or phrase is a heat map of individual interpretations, and what you're calling "misattribution" is the process which the entirety of the world's human languages bubble up from. it's what allows language to keep pace with our animate souls. the prescriptivist model is of course eternally protected from people seeing how broken it is by the impossibility of its raison d'etre: to "fix" everyone's speech. they're like passengers on an airplane trying to fix the problem of engine noise by turning off all the engines. or more charitably like a five-year-old with a plastic bucket and shovel trying to clean all the sand off the beach, gleefully enjoying the pleasures of a day at the seaside despite their stated mission being to destroy it.

F. Hazel speaks truth of course.

My POV (hah) is that professionally, I have to pretend to believe (or appear to believe) in a definition of right/wrong usage that has its basis in power.

I think of it in instrumental terms: if you want thing X, do thing Y. Which is actually descriptivism by the back door: If your audience thinks a usage is wrong with a capital W, it becomes wrong for me to use it.

Sometimes it's rhetoric in the sense of persuasion - if writing is meant to persuade, the writer has to meet the standards of usage of those who are persuaded by a particular style/register/formality level.

And sometimes they don't know what they're responding to except a general level of polish, currently in flux.

Sometimes it's just economics: the audience that matters is the person who signs my paycheck.

xp to f. hazel haha i love that post.

it's what allows language to keep pace with our animate souls.

i feel like one big reason why prescriptivism will never leave is hierarchy, another fundamental human creation. yes language emerges but it's never a utopia as much as one wishes it were.

Interesting posts! "Mass of idiolects" and "heat map of individual interpretations" are really insightful ways to describe this, thanks.

Raising the bogeyman of prescriptivism, I'm reminded of an exchange I saw on bluesky the other day. Two posters were advocating for rival meanings of "most": "50%+1" versus "nearly all" (e.g., she received the most votes vs. he ate most of the cake). After a typical exchange about their differing contexts and usage, both parties took pains to say "I'm not a prescriptivist, I'm not saying the other meaning is wrong," which I found amusing as the prescriptivist take on this, afaict, would be that both meanings are in the dictionary, both are correct, and users of the word should be sensitive to this ambiguity...plus maybe a bit of "learning standard definitions of words can aid in clear communication better than the vulgar descriptivism of being ignorant of rival definitions while angrily insisting on the correctness of the one most familiar to you."

So I don't know, while language pedants are definitely frequently irritating, I can't quite sign on to the idea that establishing standard definitions of words is equivalent to destroying the language (if that's what you're saying? your last two metaphors are a little hard to follow), or that it's "bad" to imagine a language as something outside of oneself, that's socially constructed in extremely messy and uneven acts of loose consensus building. Or maybe we should distinguish between positive and negative prescriptivisms? Like these two amateur descriptivists seemed to believe simultaneously that the "dictionary definition" of a word is useless but also that their own personal, restrictive definition of "most" needed to be taken into account by other speakers, which felt pretty close to embracing ignorance to me.

Not sure this makes any sense! I am also not a linguist by any stretch.

(xpost, this took a while to write and is more confused than I'd like)

yes. but the error is characterizing that process as "misattribution". that presupposes that some objective frame of reference exists for "correctness" in a language and it does not.

I think you can have one person intending a word to mean something specific, and another person thinking they mean something different, and that would be misattribution. There's no requirement for objective 'correctness' here, but whether it corresponds with what was intended by the first person.

(I'm interpreting f.hazel's use of the word 'error' to mean 'thing that was right, correct and very clever to say' - cheers!)

yeah I think my overly long post is just about the difficulties of communication and that maybe demonizing prescriptivism — as sound as that is within a linguistics context — isn't helpful if people take it as a license to approach language purely solipsistically

and I like how these arguments have all been about the kind of people who do this, which, obviously, is based on 'what I reckon'.
Usually I'm just trying to make myself clear and understood - it's actually something I find really hard when tone is so much of what people 'hear'- so I'm scrabbling around for the right 'heatmap', or bits of the heatmap for that person.

(I'm reminded of the time my OH described something as a 'scheme' in the US and the other person was very offended, as it has purely negative connotations we don't have here)

yeah I think 'scheme' gets conflated with 'scam' a lot in the U.S.

It's not mere conflation. The devious connotation has been attached to the word "scheme" for a long time, it's just that that is the predominant meaning in the U.S. whereas the U.K. tends to use it more neutrally.

The word “scheme” derives from Latin and Greek words meaning “form, figure,” and its first uses in English, in the 15th and 16th centuries, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, were in contexts meaning “diagram.” In 17th and 18th centuries, “scheme” took on the meeting of “plan, design; a programme of action,” the OED says, and “Hence, a plan of action devised in order to attain some end; a purpose together with a system of measures contrived for its accomplishment; a project, enterprise. Often with unfavourable notion, a self-seeking or an underhand project, a plot.”

The negative sense really took off in the mid-19th century, with the verb “to scheme,” meaning “To devise as a scheme; to lay schemes for; to effect by contrivance or intrigue.”

In most British English dictionaries, the benign use of “scheme” is usually the first definition; in American English dictionaries, the deceitful definition usually leads.

Journalism style guides are aware of this two-faced meaning. The Associated Press stylebook says of “scheme”: “Do not use as a synonym for a plan or a project.” The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage explains a little more: “The British use the term to mean plan or project (highway construction scheme). But in American usage, scheme connotes a devious plot.”

Notw, we still use "schematic," retaining the sense of "plan."

incredible to me that a column i grew up poring over on my parents’ bed on sunday mornings, enjoying and also handling as if radioactive once i learned william safire’s politics, and that i guess i assumed was an institution that pre-dated him (can’t be bothered to google) is now being written by unimpeachably otm good dude nitsuh!!

Safire originated the column in 1979, then he was succeeded by Ben Zimmer (another good dude, at least based on my online interactions with him), and then the column went away for a while until it was revived last month. I posted about Nabisco's takeover the other day in another thread.

And by "last month," I mean "two months ago."

a new meaning for "last month" that the kids have invented

(I'm reminded of the time my OH described something as a 'scheme' in the US and the other person was very offended, as it has purely negative connotations we don't have here)

It means a council housing estate in Scotland and that usually comes with negative connotations!

“a new meaning for "last month" that the kids have invented”

nah it’s been around for a minute