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

Don't put your options on me.

Oooh, in the name of love

Ending a sentence with a stray "...so..."

I keep waiting for the speaker to provide more detail

"lethal aid". just say "weapons", that's what you mean.

"Local bar."

People in song lyrics are always going into local bars. What other kind of bar would they go into? Aren't most bars local to somewhere?

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8s0vaj1G4i0/TE7GgN759II/AAAAAAAAAHg/Ty5AU7-Z3Vw/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/UniversalBar.jpg

I was going to post "lethal aid" here the other day, but 'annoy the shit out of...' doesn't quite cover my feelings in this instance, to say the least. Horrific.

"lethal aid". just say "weapons", that's what you mean.

― koogs, Tuesday, 1 March 2022 04:52

team meeting just now instead of saying "the elephant in the room" they said "we need to talk about the stinky fish"

Ugh.

seriously ugh ... i regret the time and energy i spent arguing about microwaving fish on ilx, definitely not a hill worth dying on

thirded

"front of house" referring to people who actually do the work

there's this implied "as opposed to me, a svengali who distributes power and influence behind the scenes"

I suppose it's entirely fair to be annoyed that people are *misusing* common phrases

right

there's this implied "as opposed to me, a svengali who distributes power and influence behind the scenes"

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, March 9, 2022 4:47 AM (five hours ago)

lol, i don't think i've heard this usage before ... though i'm familiar with the hospitality industry and theaters where the term is common and it's ... not that? i mean, there's the distinction between interacting with the public and not interacting with the public, as well as a gendered aspect that the people in the back tend to be male or at least more of them are men than front of house.

i’m talking about as a metaphor in a business context and yes there is absolutely that gendered aspect to it - thank you for putting your finger on it

There’s now a Twitter bot for this thread

https://mobile.twitter.com/lifeofwordsbot

xp - but it's interesting (to me) that the bizspeak translation has that implication, whereas the context it was taken from has other inequitable aspects (e.g. cooks and stagehands get paid more an hour -- minus tips -- than box office staff or waitstaff) but there's a back-and-forth in terms of power relations kinda

“thought leader”

"Local bar."

People in song lyrics are always going into local bars. What other kind of bar would they go into? Aren't most bars local to somewhere?

My job involves a lot of analysis for town/city centres or local authorities/municipalities and colleagues looove to write 'local residents' in their reports. like it's already implied that residents are local otherwise we'd call them visitors

'strategic goals' or 'strategic plan' or strategic anything always feels redundant to me too. like surely a plan is already strategic? what elevates a strategic plan above a regular plan?

Ending a sentence with a stray "...so..."

I keep waiting for the speaker to provide more detail

― Front-loaded albums are musical gerrymandering (Prefecture),

apologies, I do this so often but fwiw I cringe inside every time

xp - thought leader is the fucking worst. It sounds like something cluelessly misappropriated from a dystopian novel. I actually find it concerning that people use this term in an unironic way.

When did people start using “high-level” to describe a introductory overview. I get that it’s meant in a “birds-eye-view picture” way, but given that “high-level” usually means “advanced”, it’s very confusing.

People in song lyrics are always going into local bars.

I have observed in song lyrics that when there is a conflict between conforming to normal speech patterns and making a line more singable, the more singable version tends always to win out. As it should.

Local bar seems completely normal to me but I've known a lot of people for whom it was completely normal to travel 30 minutes to the bar they like vs. the nearest dive.

When did people start using “high-level” to describe a introductory overview.

my co-worker has used it for at least a couple years .... i use it ironically because of that, like "high-level, you need to get me your receipts if you want to get paid back"

Ending a sentence with a stray "...so..."

I keep waiting for the speaker to provide more detail

― Front-loaded albums are musical gerrymandering (Prefecture),

I like this usage. How to say "there's more to this -- we can go deeper or leave it there" in one syllable.

Pointlessly ornate British expressions such as 'indeed it is' instead of 'yes', or 'your good self' instead of 'you'. I'm sure it's all bound up in social class somehow, because how could it not be in this fucking country?

I think it's more tied up in the tradition of the great British twat.

The phrase "....on steroids."

it's like Uber... for steroids

... on steroids

Lately:
Utilize - is it different than “use”??
Comfortability, to mean “comfort”

I might actually be annoyed by “utilize” but I’m at least a little bit amused by “comfortability.” It’s silly but…padded like an oversized armchair. A comfortabil one.

'The ability to be comfortable' suggests that the subject of the sentence isn't, at this moment in time, actually comfortable.

I think there are slightly different connotations to utilise & use: make useful vs make use of

Complaints that it is a pointless fancying-up of a perfectly good word by fools trying to sound clever have been around forever (it is satirised in gaddis’s jr in 1975) but I reckon it’s fine

"Tiddies" is a twitter thing ime, often used by women? Might just be who I follow though. For me, I think the acceptability of this one depends on who's using it.

I always replace utilise with use when editing

Pointlessly ornate British expressions

and 'whilst' with 'while'

Pointlessly ornate British expressions such as 'indeed it is' instead of 'yes', or 'your good self' instead of 'you'. I'm sure it's all bound up in social class somehow, because how could it not be in this fucking country?

I think there are slightly different connotations to utilise & use: make useful vs make use of

^^ What I was taught. As in, "I utilized this fork to comb my hair." Students and administrators, though, like what they consider fancy-pants jargon.

I work in local government and business speak keeps creeping in: “deliverables”, a request is an “ask”, “elevator pitch”. I’m talking about a rezoning not trying to get a producer to read my script about a sassy robot.

one of my managers likes to edit my work into language adjacent to this ^ and i have a high level of comfortability utilizing the "reject" button

since i was very young i have hated abbreviations for things. i didn't know people called interrogatories "rogs" and "rogs" have been a big part of my life lately. i want to just tell them i don't like it. it doesn't sound cool. it's not hard to use the whole word. i've been trying just not to use any word. just working on "them."

looool harbl!

Asks and pitches are everywhere in my world, along with stakeholders. Sometimes you have to just go with the flow.

Boring Md., don't forget "guvna"

“Stakeholders” doesn’t bother me, it makes some sort of sense when you are trying to bring disparate groups and interests together to try to produce, for example, a small area plan. Also use of that phrase long predates my time. The language I roll my eyes at has crept in over the last decade.

here we occasionally show our true faith by calling students "customers"

Squire and guv I hear occasionally (rarely unselfconsciously). "Love" is standard everyday use.

A few minutes ago I was queuing in a shop and the woman at the till called her customer "love" and in his reply he called her "duck" (he was from Derbyshire, Im guessing by his accent + use of "duck").

We had a meeting last week where somebody had to bring in draft version of a website structure and they all called it the "straw man". Like, can you bring in the straw man into the meeting for us to discuss? So weird.

I don't mind business terms like "stakeholder" because, even if they're not the sort of word you'd use outside of work, at least they have a singular, useful, definable meaning. I don't like words like "deliverables" because they seem disingenuous to me. What "deliverables" means is "the things we have to produce", but calling those things "deliverables" makes it easier for people to forget that actual creative work needs to happen in order to produce them, and managers hate thinking about actual work, because they don't do any.

Also hate "I'm conscious of time" because (a) isn't everyone conscious of time? and (b) what it really means is "everyone shut the fuck up so I can leave this meeting"

(Also the implication is "I am conscious of time and you are not.")

"everyone shut the fuck up so I can leave this meeting"

That's pretty much what I'm thinking the whole time in every meeting.

here we occasionally show our true faith by calling students "customers"

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, March 15, 2022 9:41 AM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

As a therapist who has worked in a variety of different settings, it is always interesting to see where the culture is to refer to "patients" vs "clients" vs (the true faith revealer) "consumers."