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

there's no good word for being a reader and listener and viewer and gamer

Aesthete?

Halfway through the Ashes and I am heartily sick of hearing and reading the phrase "for the ages".

okay, we're doing some project at my work around "skilling"

it's a verb based on skill, who comes up with this shit

i know a guy whose last name is skillings.

you'd probably hate him.

would make a skilling off the merchandise

I'm all skilling at my learnings

I do think it's call center lingo, cos most telephony services have to add specific skills for specific types of calls to route to that department, so they talk about "I skilled Jonathan to Retention Services for the evening" etc

well, if I ain't fer it, I'm agin it

"the competition for eyeballs, ears and fingers has never been greater"

"How's you?" Not that I hear this much anymore, except ironically.

"enough about me, what's going on with this whole.... YOU thing?"

"I regret to inform you..." about some mundane thing.

"How's you?" Not that I hear this much any[/more, except ironically.

This appears still to be in use in New York, in particular.

in youse

I don't really like the way that 'rewatch' has become so standard.

It's clearly because 'review' already means something different.

But 'rewatch' still feels to me ugly and a compromise, a substitute word, as just suggested.

I had meant to note something on this thread.

When people (especially artists) say that their success is remarkable as they come from a place.

>>> Cellophane Spoons, the new 4-piece setting Steve Lamacq's programme alight. "Not bad for four lads from Hull!"

I literally saw a Guardian headline recently saying "Not bad for four lads from Sheffield!"

Now, there are cases where this formulation might make sense.

"Winning the Booker Prize? I suppose it's not bad for this former Somalian asylum seeker who fled persection then spent 5 years looked in an Australian detention centre". Yes.

But when the place is simply a location in a rich country of the developed world / Global North, the claim becomes almost meaningless.

Maybe "Not bad from a lass from Orkney" - somewhere implying isolation - OK.

But Hull and Sheffield, for instance, are major cities in the world's 6th biggest economy. They both have established histories of cultural achievement. There is nothing at all remarkable about succeeding when coming from them.

And everyone has to come from somewhere. But still people think that whatever place they came from is the one that makes their success unlikely.

In fact perhaps the most ridiculous case of all was Kingsley Amis: "Not bad from a boy from Norbury, eh?". Norbury is a comfortable suburban area about 7 miles from the UK Parliament.

Anywhere that's not London and the South East is a foreign country to the UK media.

I think pinefox it talking about when artists say it about themselves. Didn't someone white and British get embroiled in a social media storm recently when their acceptance speech at an awards ceremony used this trope, making some people, mainly Americans, indignant, their reading being that it was implying he hadn't come from a position of privilege? Can't think who it was now.

I literally saw a Guardian headline recently saying "Not bad for four lads from Sheffield!"

Can't find this (maybe it was a print headline?)

Did find this though

Not bad for a ‘fat lad from Sheffield’: Sharp out for promotion with Blades

'A fat lad from Sheffield' - really just means 'a fat person, who thus wouldn't be expected to be good at sport', doesn't it?

The idea that being from Sheffield would impede him succeeding at soccer is preposterous, but it gets tacked on and, I suppose, diminishes the sting of the 'fat lad' insult.

I've always thought of Sheffield as being a relatively wealthy city.

we should at the very least press for it to gain similar prominence as a negative corollary

only having a career that maxes out at non-league level -----> not great for a lad from toxteth

Didn't someone white and British get embroiled in a social media storm recently when their acceptance speech at an awards ceremony used this trope, making some people, mainly Americans, indignant, their reading being that it was implying he hadn't come from a position of privilege? Can't think who it was now.

Answering my own question, it was Harry Styles. He didn't actually name where he was from, he just said “This doesn’t happen to people like me very often".

https://www.nme.com/news/music/harry-styles-people-like-me-grammys-speech-earns-backlash-3393823

do people from location x get to self determine whether international superstardom is strange for them or not

I suspect a lot of people who say stuff like this are simply marveling at how they were once unknown outside of where they come from, and perhaps still primarily think of themselves as a person from that place rather than as a global celebrity.

Exactly.

Sort of a mild version of imposter syndrome.

Not bad for a person from New York city

Not bad for a person from Beverly Hills

The Harry Styles thing was pretty funny because it's left entirely to the reader to decide what he actually meant by "people like me".

"people who can't shit in war movies"

she was only a grocer's daughter

"pretty much exactly"

pretty fly for a Sheffield guy

"you are a fucking amazing group of product managers, i just want to say that"

"You have the day you deserve".

not because it wasn't an effective 'fuck off' used against people who were abusive or awful people, but now it's once again been co-opted and seems to be used in situations that don't even remotely warrant such a level of aggression, like someone getting your order wrong at Wendy's or arguing whether someone was offside or not.

You know what I hate?

I hate "as [so-and-so] might put it" ...when the phrase that so-and-so "might" use is something the person wrote/said/sang ONCE (even if it was very famous).

My long-time annoyance at this was re-triggered by this sentence, in reference to the summer of 1974 in American politics: "It was, as Charles Dickens might put it, the best of times and the worst of times." Really? As though that weren't just a sentence in one of his books, but the dude's fucking catchphrase or something.

― jaymc, Thursday, June 30, 2011 4:48 PM (twelve years ago) bookmarkflaglink

OTM

What's funny about that Gopnik excerpt is that he's quoting himself. Like hey, this phrase I just came up with reminds me of Sergio Leone.

xps not otm imo!

you're just complaining about a careless use of the word "might" really?

As Jon Anderson might say, "yes"

fair

well, Adam Gopnick is a total hack

https://i.imgur.com/X9PsTeG.jpg

I've been getting inundated with cold-call sales emails and they all talk like this

why do you answer them?

oh oops, missed the "emails" part ... n/m

"lovely jubbly"

in correspondence from my mobile phone provider no less

"The blob"

I mean "the deep state" is a stupid expression but it least it sounds dramatic. "The blob" is the kind of Eton-level schoolboy joke phrase you could imagine a bunch of Tory tossers chortling about because they mistakenly think it's funny. In fact you don't have to imagine it, it's what they publicly do.

"Brits"

Fair enough if an American uses it but I've just heard a Sky reporter use it. It would be a bit like if a US reporter referred to Americans as Yanks in a serious news report.

I think that battle is lost. There's a new generation that doesn't think it makes us sound like cunts.