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

I hate the name of the animal species 'Kinkajou'.

Yeah but "Too Shy" was a jam, admit it.

Speaking of police verbiage, I hate the use of "suspect" when it refers to someone obviously doing something.

"We interrupted and restrained the suspect as he was knifing the deceased victim."

You now hear witnesses in TV news clips use that phrasing.

"The alleged perpetrator appeared to be engaged in a knifing-related incident."

I suspect that is for legal reasons

altercation is a hilarious word

― marcos, Tuesday, February 7, 2017

ugh I hate it too

what's worse is when journalists repeat it. It's like, "No, dude – you don't get to repeat ridiculous police jargon; it's your job to translate it."

Thoroughfare

I feel like police reports should get Blackadder treatment.

"The suspect then contaminated a pedestrian passageway with unsanitary solid matter, creating an undesirable environment for civilians trying to negotiate the crosswalk."

'Are you saying he shat in the middle of the street?'

I don't like the fake neutrality of 'altercation'. It makes it sound like all of the parties were equally responsible for whatever happened.

maybe replace it with "donnybrook"

"The victim then shouted 'Gardyloo!' before emptying the contents of a bucket of slop out of his window. The slop accelerated until it came to rest upon the suspect's head. The suspect became quite agitated and began issuing a strongly worded challenge to the victim. The victim chortled, and insinuated he had inappropraite relations with the suspect's spouse and began to describe her genitalia in language inappropriate for these proceedings. That, Your Honor, is when the suspect reached for his revolver..."

i hate it when a new restaurant is referred to as a "concept", like "so and so's new seafood centric concept." i hate only slightly less references to a cocktail "program."

I prefer cocktail regimes

I prefer conceptual restaurants, like where you order the food but aren't allowed to eat it.

"so, so _________" (which i have seen exclusively online)

no need for so x2
why the comma?
cmon

^so, so much this

there is always a comma too
i'm kind of obsessed about how these things spread -- who is the person using this to such effect that so, so many people are adopting it? does it signify something? so, so unnecessary

phrases and things, it's fascinating how viral they become. i think i noticed it more in this past year. maybe especially in relation to the election season. which is why when Hillary used the word "deplorables" i think i felt a cold chill.

Can we blame Trump for this one, perhaps?

xp - language has always been like that, but the speed of proliferation is much faster. i am also obsessed with the various usages of "don't @ me" but that's another story. it's not annoying but it does interest me.

i doubt so, so has to do with him. trump has definitely ruined exclamation points, the word "sad", and message final exclamations. Wrong!

speaking of deplorables, recently my parents went to a wake and the people hosting it introduced themselves to my parents and said "we're deplorables!"
whoa

jeez...

i think my aunt changed her twitter name to include "deplorable". otm, tbh.

i've yet to hear the word "cuck" IRL.

using the word "practice" to make yourself sound rigorous and academic. i.e. instead of art "artistic practice" or instead of theatre "theatre practice"

theater practice is what we had after school on tuesdays + thursdays in sixth grade to get ready for the year end performance

"what i want to examine is the dialectics of actual soccer practice"

pretty sure that's "soccer praxis"

i hate in top chef & fancy cooking shows the way they repeatedly use "a little bit of" describe how their dishes are composed

"we have seared duck liver with a little bit of lime, a little bit of smoked sea salt, a little bit of sea urchin etc etc etc"

we can *see* that you didnt use a truckload of each of these things! quit modifying it all so incessantly

Or "simply!"

"Simply sous vide the cut for 12 hours, removing it from the bag every hour and a half to re-season it."

"Simply make a chiffonade of all of the different vegetables and roast them, turning them every 5 minutes until they are evenly golden-brown."

i will have a little bit of duck liver with gobs of lime, oodles of sea salt, and a butt-ton of sea urchin, please

Wish they'd say "an immoderate handful of" from time to time like normal ppl

today through the magic of twitter dot com i became aware of george takei using the word 'butthurt'

I am into ''practice'' where it has some relation to the ''practice of everyday life'' - recognizing that your job/calling/duty/ethics are not static things, but made up of countless little actions and choices, is super important to me. Also implies getting better at something, working towards something, trying an approach through doing... idk I think it's okay.

"activist judges", mostly cos it aggravates me that people still think SCOTUS randomly seeks out cases outside of its purview and creates new laws in a fluid motion

My cooking-show pet peeve is the invariable formula "I've made for you" in presenting dishes to judges. This is so prevalent on Chopped (and its spinoffs) that I wonder if it's contractually required.

Contestant 1: "Chefs, today I have made for you a toe jam remoulade with a crisped snakeskin tartlet, garnished with some wild phlox berries."

Contestant 2: "What I have prepared for you today is a gumball goulash with a garlic gastrique, served on a bed of jalapeno polenta."

Contestant 3: "Judges, I've made for you some persimmon fritters dipped in balsamic reduction with flash-fried nose hairs on top. It's my playful take on an authentic Albanian flrzigribl."

Contestant 4: "Chefs, what I've made for you today is..." DEAR GOD MAKE IT STOP

Overuse of "curate". You don't run a museum, you just made a spotify playlist.

DJI - instruction manuals do this too. Sometimes subbing in the word "just":

"Just create a bootable installer and follow the instructions that appear on the screen."

No no that's fine it's not like these are the INSTRUCTIONS that ought to be taking me through the process step by step instead of telling me how goddamn SIMPLE everything is well guess what if it was so SIMPLE I WOULDN'T BE READING THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THE FIRST PLACE YOU COCKFARMER

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7jYPp9w-0Uk

Feeling Tracer Hand on this 100%.

I was thinking about VG when I was making dinner tonight and telling a story in my head about how I would present it on a cooking show to a panel of chef judges. It went something like "today I've prepared for you a 'Game Day' soup, which "reconstructs" chicken, carrots, and celery in a cream soup with blue cheese and Buffalo seasonings, served with diced "French Fry" potatoes and crispy duck skin."

I actually prepared this and it is good, but it sounds way more fancy with the mandated cooking show lingo.The contestants must be coached/forced/edited to use that formula.

"prepared"

thank u quincie for not using "a little bit of" any of those things

soup sounds dope as hell btw

oh god yes

Somewhere there's a passage from the middlebrow yet genial Bill Bryson that parodies that flowery culinary language; lemme find it:

I had, and I quote, 'Fanned Galia Melon and Cumbrian Air Dried Ham served with a Mixed leaf Salad' followed by 'Fillet Steak served with a crushed Black Peppercorn Sauce flamed in Brandy and finished with Cream' .... I was greatly taken with this new way of talking and derived considerable pleasure from speaking it to the waiter. I asked him for a lustre of water freshly drawn from the house tap and presented au nature in a cylinder of glass, and when he came round with the bread rolls I entreated him to present me a tonged rondel of blanched wheat oven baked and masked in a poppy-seed coating. I was just getting warmed up to this and about to ask for a fanned lap coverlet, freshly laundered and scented with a delicate hint of Omo, to replace the one that had slipped from my lap and now lay recumbent on the horizontal walking surface anterior to my feet...

lol

<3 Bill Bryson I think of Notes from a Small Island all the time re British place names: "They live in Barking and Dorking and Shellow Bowels!"

This post brought to you by me watching a show called like "Animal SOS" about vets rescuing foxen and badgers and other English countryside animals and referring to a place called "Woking" which it turns out is not far from Dorking after all.

British Isles town names (eg. Twatt in Scotland, Studland down south) are great LOL. Alien.

heddington fosley
wilming-on-sea
snibbinghamshire
cuxforth dale
east glesforth
hostencester (pron. hoster)
minceworth
twabbingwood
charking

(they don't annoy me, just contributing)