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

I guess "client-side" preceded "client-facing," but the latter isn't any worse.

"raise awareness", "provide support"

basically all modern uses of "support" as some vast vague sea in which the concept of "help" is drowning

that's my job man :/

I mean yeah you are right these thoughts have occured

yeah it's not the delivery of it or its existence - more like... why can't we explain it more clearly?

sometimes weak laws or legal blind spots lead to weak language though, so perhaps i'm blaming the victim...

(sorry if i seemed dismissive - i'm coming at it from the side of helping people also!)

nah it doesn't seem dismissive I have had literally the same thoughts

also I have to explain to people quite often what "support" isn't i.e. magical bypassing of somebody's actual abilities

i guess it feels like an inevitable failure when the state tries to find a universal language to talk about helping very individual problems

what's a search channel specialist?

Where I work it's support for search engine marketing campaigns.

army brat

I keep seeing internet nerds using "nonsense / nonsense on stilts" -- I'm sure that sounded witty when Jeremy Bentham first said it but now uuuuuuugh.

"Convo" for "conversation." Just around the corner: such-and-such a player is "in the convo" for MVP.

"mic drop"

"no fucks to give" in relation to Obama is waaaay played-out

visioning

pretty much any of those annoying bloggy idioms becomes 10x more noxious when used in political commentary. It always reminds me of the college student govt kiss-asses trying to be cool

the false excitement of "pop-up"

turning nouns into verbs by adding "up."

manning up
changing up

shut up

(sorry couldn't resist)

The worst is "cowgirl up"

I'm afraid to ask what that means

Not really. What does that mean?

variation on "man up"

I got IA at "blew up" used sixteen times in an NPR piece today e.g. "it blew up on social media"

"grow a pair"

ok what is a "fuckboy" -- it feels like a failed attempt by resentful dorks to slut-shame more attractive men.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/08/18/what_does_fuckboy_mean.html

I now don't understand at all.

"a worthless human" is the only definition you need to know

insult that sounds like a homophobic slur, but really it totally isn't!

Rather than resentful (male) dorks, I think it mostly comes from the mouths of resentful girls these days.

I hit the point recently where the word "intersectionality" makes me want to throw a television out a window. I think it's a combination of (1) its frequent use by condescending little shits (2) the sense of wheel-reinvention it has (as though this is the first generation to notice that there is interplay between race, class, gender, etc.) (3) its vaguely pseudoscientific ring, as though it were describing something you could plot out on a graph or chart and (4) the fact that it often seems to be used in place of actual insight into the ways race/class/gender/sexuality, um, intersect, like instead of actually saying anything thoughtful about the topic, you can just say "intersectionality" and be done. I got particularly mad when some young blogger accused Gloria Steinem of not understanding intersectionality, as though the debate about race and class in feminism hasn't been going on for decades, like it has never occurred to Gloria fucking Steinem before that such a thing exists.

I'm probably repeating myself... but when seemingly decent folk say they're "socially liberal, fiscally conservative"... it just makes me think of all the social service programs gutted by the recession. oh well fuck the poor, the invalid, the disabled, the mentally ill, I WANT MY MONEY

It also has a ring of the whole self congratulatory "I work hard, I balance my household budget, I am amazing blah blah blah"

yeah it's part of the whole weird designation of what things are "social issues" as if economics, power and suffering are not part of the social, have no impact on society, etc.

"intersectionality" i'd defend on the grounds of it IS a meaningful thing and if nothing else, in the right context, can be a useful string around the finger to remind you as you write to try and be precise about where exactly the points of intersection are and how they work. recently appreciated this kind of precision in anne mcclintock's imperial leather for one. but obviously anything can be ruined by being casually or newbishly thrown around.

"it is what it is"
"we are where we are"

You ain't what you're not
So see what you got....

"intersectionality" i'd defend on the grounds of it IS a meaningful thing and if nothing else, in the right context, can be a useful string around the finger to remind you as you write to try and be precise about where exactly the points of intersection are and how they work

yeah i mean the fact that "the debate about race and class in feminism [has] been going on for decades" yet often in activist etc circles has gotten virtually nowhere shows that it might be useful to have a formal term for the kinds of discussions we want to be having about class + race + gender and so on

https://twitter.com/crushingbort/status/463132110006784000 is a good summation of 'social liberal, fiscal conservative' imo

^ ahh that is good

The word "folks" is strangely ubiquitous in certain strands of, for lack of a better term, "social justice" writing. Particularly about trans issues, it seems. For instance, a friend of mine linked this article on facebook the other day; the word "folks" appears in it twenty-five times. That grates on me for some reason.

we oppressed some folks

Susan Jacoby had a screed against "folks" in The Age of American Unreason:

http://www.correntewire.com/susan_jacoby_on_the_word_folks_and_the_debasement_of_language

I knew Obama was a sociopath when he stopped looking as if he were passing gas when saying it.

I've never heard it used before but, in attempting to explain how Jimmy Saville could get away with raping 10 years olds, Tony Hall, the Director-General of the BBC, just used the word 'Siloed'.

prob because it's crept into workthink language - you'll quite often hear it being used, usually but not always negatively, to describe discrete departments or even vertical interests incapable of communicating of each other, usually for structural or organisational reasons. As soon as a word like that creeps into that sort of language, you do anything with it, the classic example, not particularly egregious really, is using action as a verb.

i mean "using 'action' as a verb". didn't see the ambiguity.

in this area, i'm really really going to conduct at a personal war in the workplace on the phrase 'get clarity'.

This was not perhaps the best context for Lord Hall to indulge in 'workthink language'.