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

"licking his wounds"

gross dude

I've moved from the bizspeak world to the psychobabble world, and recently caught myself telling some coworkers (after venting about some social work stuff), "thanks for letting me process that!"

ctrl+F - "spitballing" = 0

amazing. anyway, SPITBALLING

i kind of unashamedly love psychobabble and therapy jargon. i was in therapy for five years and i'm married to a social worker, have a lot of social worker friends

<3 "process"

"thought process"

"thought process" is ok. it's stupid but unoffensive imo.

silo/silo mentality is an old one in corpspeak.

"made that ask"

like instead of "I asked them that question", it's "I made that ask". wtf

that sounds a bit clumsy tho "ask" as a noun has been around since the 10th century

Here’s an OED example in modern English from a Dec. 8, 1781, letter by the scholar Thomas Twining (whose grandfather founded the Twinings tea empire):

“I am not so unreasonable as to desire you to take notice of all the stuff I scribble, or answer all my asks.” (We’ve expanded on the citation.)

And here’s an example from The Laws and Principles of Whist, an 1886 book written by “Cavendish” (the pen name of Henry Jones): “When your three comes down in the next round, it is not an ask for trumps.”

these seem to be functioning as informal elisions of the more common (but still not very common) 'askings'

i'll use ask in that way. the v popular idiom, from apparently the 80s, is "that's a big ask," which i think i prefer to "that's asking a lot" because of the emphasis it puts on the difficulty of the thing being requested vs. the impudence of the person doing the asking.

It's not really that different, semantically speaking, from "request," which has also had noun and verb forms for centuries.

"I request that you eat my shorts." / "That's a big request."

"I ask that you eat my shorts." / "That's a big ask."

One could simply say that the objection is aesthetic (sounds yucky), and/or cultural (yucky people say it).

For some reason, when people latch onto a usage they don't like, they often say "ZOMG HORRID BIZSPEAK JARGON NEOLOGISM THAT MUST BE STOPPED." They could just say "I don't like this usage, no matter where it came from and no matter how old or young it is."

"Don't bring me problems - bring me solutions".

mostly cos usually the person who says it is the one that created the problem and this is usually said when someone is merely asking for help with the solution to the problem you just dumped in their lap 5 minutes ago

also "Today is a gift - that's why they call it the present", which several co-workers used to have as their tag on instant messaging

Ugh half my colleagues have cod-awful motivational sayings on their Skype profiles. I'm sure its just to look good to the bosses.

I have been tempted to change mine to "Eat My Fuc" now that my review is over

xp uh I mean inoffensive

lol irony

referring to people as "humans," as in "s/he's one of my favorite humans." Dunno if this is derived from political correctness (although I can't see the word "people" offending anyone), or is meant to distinguish humans from--I dunno--androids or something, or is just something some excruciatingly precious people have adopted, but whatever the reason, it needs to stop

I think I used to say "human" on occasion but phased it out when I realized I sounded like a sci-fi character so switched back to person/people.

i dig 'humans,' i don't say it all the time but certainly there are times when you want something that affirms the, well, humanity of the group in question. whether that's in defiance of political threats or positive recognition of someone's decency or efforts to be good and stay sane. idk. it's not a bad thing, it's not really better or worse than 'people' in most situations but it has its place.

"individuals"

Is Del the Funky Homosapien still okay?

Another language thing that doesn't quite fit the title: who smacks their lips before they go to sleep? I've known people to do this meant humorously but who did this before cartoons did?

shitshow

thinkpiece

shitpiece

dumpster fire (which I'm sure has already been covered)
hot mess

side hustle, which I heard a reporter awkwardly use on the news the other day re: Uber (clearly mocking the term)

"Reminder:" followed by something political or #SoImportant

One that drives me crazy (especially once you start noticing it) is "the fact that." It's become this annoying tic that people use which is completely unnecessary.

or worse:

"due to the fact that"

I've realized this horror was born of students hearing from elementary and high school teachers that – get this – you can't start sentences with "because" and other conjunctions.

God, yeah, the constant reminders on Twitter. Everyone wants to remind you of something.

I have so many of these bad habits from high school that work emails require me to re-review them three times to trim the fat

That and the "assume your audience is stupid" line of teaching i got

presser

so-called

Lump crabmeat. This sounds like something the crab is worried will show up on its x-rays. If you mean nice crabmeat, just say nice crabmeat.

crabmeat

wtf call it meat?

We don't call other stuff codmeat or tilapiameat or lobstermeat.

Also, shellfish is weird.

tuna fish!

"Due to the fact that... " pales before the phrases

- as you can see
- as I have indicated
- as I proven
- as should be clear
- in conclusion
- in summary

Appending -fish or -meat is a necessity with tinned or frozen product, as the provenance of a grayish protein isn't always obvious.

thread diving deep into lesswrong territory

interesting footnote - meat used to mean food in general and only came to mean animal flesh later on. there's a vestige of the original meaning in sweetmeat which isn't meat at all obv.

soda, ugh, yes. that comes from years of shit teaching in high schools which sadly is used even in Honors level classes.

When I made it into AP English I took forever to succeed because I kept using what they taught me in Honors and the teacher was all like "lol that's bullshit".

tuna fish!

― DJI, Tuesday, 7 March 2017 08:48 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i never understood this, unless somewhere there's a species of tuna horse

tuna ferret