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?"

As I child I heard the faux/folk etymology P.O.S.H. (port out, starboard home, ostensibly from voyages to India). Now in doubt.

Dissociation is not remotely the same as vegging out fwiw

If it were, I wouldn’t find myself dissociating at work

There's more red haired people in the British Isles and Ireland than anywhere else in the world, so they're not rare enough to be associated with special, positive qualities.

As I child I heard the faux/folk etymology P.O.S.H. (port out, starboard home, ostensibly from voyages to India). Now in doubt.

― je ne sequoia (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, August 27, 2025 11:09 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

In her book Word by Word, former Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper calls this story "beautiful -- and total bullshit. Etymology requires evidence, and in spite of all the e-mails and letters we've gotten over the years (all the way back to the 1930s, in fact), there is bugger-all written evidence for this origin story for 'posh.'"

xp what is the difference then? i looked up dissociate and disassociate (which -- again -- M-W and other dictionaries say means the same thing) and it said it's related to a specific kind of mental disorder that used to be called multiple personality disorder so

Conversation I had while working in a credit card customer services call centre in 2005:

Me: “Good Morning. You’re through to James in customer services. Can I just confirm that you’re the principal cardholder?”
Old Man: “Er… no. Listen.”
Me: “Ok.”
Old Man: “I tried to call you yesterday but couldn’t get through. I listen to Radio 4 all the time and I heard someone talking about the word ‘posh’ yesterday and wondered if you knew how it came into being.”
Me: “You mean ‘Port Out Starboard Home’?”
Old Man: “Yes, because when they were sailing to India the richer passengers would be able to book out these sides and stay in the shade the whole way.”
Me: “Yes, I did hear about that.”
Old Man: “Yes. Just thought you might like to know.”
Me: “Yes. Thanks for bringing it up. I’ll take a note of it.”

AI google served me this (abridged)

Why it happens
A coping mechanism:
Dissociation serves as a psychological escape, protecting the brain from overwhelming stress or trauma by disconnecting from the experience.
Triggers:
It can be triggered by intense emotional distress, acute stress, certain drugs, or medical conditions like depression and epilepsy.
Types of Dissociation
Dissociative Amnesia: An inability to recall important personal information, often following a traumatic event.
Depersonalization: A feeling of detachment from one's self, body, or thoughts.
Derealization: A feeling that one's surroundings are unreal, dreamlike, or distorted.
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID): A severe form where individuals have two or more distinct personality states (alters) and experience significant amnesia.

alternately
https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/dissociation-overview

Using 'dissociate' to mean spacing out, daydreaming, woolgathering or a pleasant sort of reverie is definitely one of my bugbears

Dissociation is a trauma response. When something overwhelming happens, the conscious mind dissociates from the environment and 'goes away for a while'. It is not a pleasant experience at all.

Disassociation OTOH is, I believe, a technical term meaning to break the association between things. For example, when we move our helpdesk from Dynamics to Zendesk, we need to disassociate the support email address from its Dynamics queue to move it to the Zendesk system.

I think both the word 'triggering' and the word 'dissociate' come from the popularity of the van der Kolk book, The Body Keeps The Score. Both originally meant a specific psychological state related to trauma. Now both are being linguistically degraded

Using 'dissociate' to mean spacing out, daydreaming, woolgathering or a pleasant sort of reverie is definitely one of my bugbears
yes, same, add when someone casually says something unpleasant gave them PTSD. people should be more grateful they don't actually have PTSD bc frankly it sucks.

linguistically degraded

"semantic broadening" is what you're looking for here

LL i know what you mean but surely nobody thinks you actually have PTSD if you say oh man just looking at a swimsuit now gives me PTSD! it’s an exaggeration that gets across a point

like if i say, oh man, when i struck out for the third time i wanted to die, nobody is going to pop up from behind a bush and be like, you should be grateful you didn’t die because actually dying is no joke

I will absolutely not be arguing with anyone experiencing psychological impacts. I don't experience this time as a pleasant reverie or daydreaming, more like a mental and physical shutdown from social & sensory exhaustion; that still probably isn't the same thing as the clinical definition.

Sorry to hear that work is bringing you to this place, LL.

Disassociate, to me, connotes something intentional — like the zendesk example, or to remove a connection to a person or entity… like, the Democratic Party. Many US ilxors disassociate themselves from the Democratic Party. Dissociate is not intentional … it involves unintentional/ uncontrolled pathological avoidance of reality. Many people are now using it to mean something closer to daydreaming and zoning out.

xp i am actually quite averse to this type of hyperbole for this very reason. a person can absolutely communicate their point in a different and less offensive way. once at work a coworker pretended to shoot herself in the head because she didn't like something (i can't even remember what, something extremely innocuous) and i asked her please to not do that, or at least to not do that around me. she apologized!

Even in orbit’s use to refer to shutting down from exhaustion… which isn’t pleasant, and is sometimes what people use it to mean … is a “semantic broadening” that I dislike just like the PTSD example… like I have known clinically dissociative people and it’s scary af to see.

Xp Tracer — that’s super contextual— and in some cases I would agree with you but in other situations, depending on the person… or day…I would have the same aversion as LL… for personal reasons.

See also the phrase “die in a fire”

yeah certain songs are ruined forever as a result of the event sarahell is talking about— see the second track on Ghost Tropic.

I started a *thread* where I 1) conflated dissasociate and dissociate *and* used the concep inappropriately. So. I did mea culpa myself in the thread and explained how I think the concept can be used with regards to music (as per La Lechera's explanation), but still.

How about 1) people who use mea culpa, and b) use it as a verb?

I used the term 'degradation' rather than 'semantic broadening' for a reason: that the specific type of change I am disussing here is a move from the term having a neutral, often clinical or academic connotation, to a wholly negative or harmful connotation

Since I was talking about van der Kolk, I was thinking more of the internet slang meaning of 'triggering' as much as 'dissociate'. Again, 'triggering' used to have a specific medical, physiological or psychological meaning. Now it has shifted to be wholly negative, meaning something like 'irrationally upset or angry about something, usually trivial'. As someone who suffers from a quite severe neurological condition with specific triggers, this switch to a negative meaning is harmful. When I need to ask for accommodations, stating 'I need to avoid this as it is triggering', it is dreadful to have others hear 'this just makes me irrationally upset' rather than 'this is a situation requiring a medical accommodation'

I do believe that the casual internet slang usage of 'dissociate' as just spacing out or woolgathering has the capacity for similar harm, as La Lechera has demonstrated

However, there are similar mental fugue-type states, such as severe Burnout (which seems like the kind of total exhaustion in orbit is describing) or Autistic Shutdown, which have very similar affect to dissociation, but without with PTSD link. I believe in precision in langage so it's probably better to use the more accurate term

I think Americans might not easily understand the level of abuse in UK culture.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Wednesday, August 27, 2025 11:49 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This was one of the weirdest things to me when I moved here the first time. I was like, wait, you make fun of everyone with red hair just for having it? I still don't get it tbh.

One I find really annoying is "let's circle back" when someone is suggesting a particular discussion had gone way off track or become bloated or bizarre or whatever.

ah re gingers its not that deep as a rule

c&p x 50 actually tbh

thread austere and ginger ranters

but let me liken it to "your momma" jokes, which ive found to be impossible to explain to american ilxors as yknow possibly worth reconsidering

whatever was accepted by a culture as joshing at a young wnough age is possibly just understood inherently differently vs hiw someone might experience it if/when they experience it from another culture or if they havent been immersed in it at that young age, etc

xp lol

That is a good analogy. I have moved in a social circle where "your mom" jokes were explicitly understood to be about a nonspecific universal or conceptual mom, not the hearer's actual human mom.

We often know the moms in question, and there is one friend whose mom is dead; we went to her funeral. Another guy is a fucking ORPHAN. Both still give/get "yer mom" and regard it as all in good fun.

I think that last part is the key but coming in from outside not just the group, but the culture, leaves the new joiner nonplussed (is that a term which has been constantly raised in this very thread i feel it is) and on the back foot- so you have three possible (at first thought) approaches maybe

- come from outside that understanding and have reason to be sensitive to that particular understood context (me to us posters snickering about dead moothers)

- come from outside that understanding and think ok weird dunno how to take that ill presume theres more going on that i just don't get (ENBB and UK culture re gingers above I think fits this?)

- come from outside that understanding but project only a personal understanding without being able to see that there is that context (i think I'm trying all the time to do less of this but i think ilx us/uk and a million other splits over the years shows examples of this)

oh i have one i meant to post

"in a minute" to mean a very long time a minute is a very short time thos isnt even witty its just wrong

cf. "in a mo"

but in a mo means in a short while

im talking about a widespread folksy american usage of "minute" that means "in a long time" and the listener is meant to *understand* this?

Oh Americans, who knows what they're on about half the time.

When kids these days say “bad”, they mean “good”. And to “shake your booty” means to wiggle one’s butt

oh i have one i meant to post

"in a minute" to mean a very long time a minute is a very short time thos isnt even witty its just wrong

"It's been a minute" v "It's been a hot minute". Not sure which is longer.

just saw this one.. "price-sensitive". as in poor.

I am actually ok with that one … because poor isn’t value-neutral. Also some people who are “price-sensitive” might technically not be poor, but they have assets that can’t easily be converted to cash.

"And to “shake your booty” means to wiggle one’s butt"

It's only a matter of time before there's a Bill and Ted sequel in which Bill and Ted travel back to pirate times, and they meet a lady pirate played by Beyonce, who is holding a bag of gold coins, and they ask her to shake her booty, and she jingles the bag of gold coins. Everybody laughs. Applause. Curtains.

It feels like the kind of joke that was probably used in one of those not-quite A-list mid-2000s comedies, such as Scooby Doo or Get Smart, obviously with modifications, but it must have been done already.

Have I mentioned case? As in "use case". The use case of this gadget is obvious. This thing has an obvious use case. It doesn't fit any use case I envisage. I struggle to see its use case. My own use case for X is Y. And so on. It just feels like an unnecessary expansion of use intended to sound a bit smarter and more formal.

e.g. use. Not use. I mean use, as in use. Short use, not long use. Yoos. Not youse.

The man never doesn’t miss

still working on that Adrian Chiles column?

The overuse of "manifest."

In Ashley’s cinematic dystopia, there will also be a “clever” reference to Manifest Destiny and the lady pirate is Manifest Destiny’s Child and people will discuss this earnestly online.

you are my manifest density

xp insert sheik yerbouti zappa pic here

"In Ashley’s cinematic dystopia, there will also be a “clever” reference to Manifest Destiny and the lady pirate is Manifest Destiny’s Child and people will discuss this earnestly online."

In my mind the character will slink into frame with the opening bars of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile" playing non-diegetically in the background, because it's 2005 and the producer/director/whoever still remembers From Dusk 'til Dawn.

Twenty years later the Great Internet Content Farm will run a bunch of articles on the topic of whether the character was an offensive stereotype, or a surprisingly well-researched depiction of voodoo, with each article illustrated by a photo of the character in a bikini, and the majority of the actual content will be posts from Reddit.

We WILL make money on AI yet who doesn’t want— nay NEED! that content?