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

"quote-unquote" followed by the thing you want to quote, which is by now outside of the quote marks and thus not quoted. Happy to see an example of this upthread!

that logic doesn't make any sense, quote-unquote is used the same way "said" is, at the beginning of the utterance that is its referent. this, for example, is not what we do in English:

The other day John said I'm going to the store said.

...although some languages probably do exactly that.

(object is probably a better term to use than referent there)

Inspired by reading this: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/mar/01/us-soccer-removes-seth-jahn-speech

“I’m sure I’m going to ruffle some feathers with what I’m about to say, especially given the athletes council that I’m on, but given the evolution of our quote-unquote, progressive culture where everything offends everybody" blah blah blah

He'd have been better off waggling his fingers in the air and affecting a sneer as he said it. Maybe he did that anyway, to be fair to the lad.

yes, it's often employed by jerks, it's just not syntactically problematic for an English utterance

"house" as a verb

even worse: housed/unhoused

I worked in housing for several years i mean i dunno what to tell ya the job is housing ppl

Jungle Brothers to thread.

I've had it up to here with the word 'to'.

yeah, not sure what the issue is with "housed"?

to house is not a home

I worked in housing for several years i mean i dunno what to tell ya the job is housing ppl

― Marry and Neghim (darraghmac), Thursday, March 11, 2021 11:59 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

<3

to house is not a home

even worse: housed/unhoused

― groovemaaan, Thursday, March 11, 2021 3:56 AM (four hours ago)

unhoused is often a more accurate term to refer to "homeless people" -- as what they actually lack is a physical structure designed for long-term residential habitation (i.e. housing) as opposed to a fixed area where they have friends, family, accounts and community services that bind them to that area (i.e. home).

An interesting difference between US and UK English is that the UK has the term 'rough sleepers' to describe homeless people who are actually sleeping on the streets, rather than the wider group of homeless people who are couch-surfing etc. As I understand it, there's no simple way of referring to rough sleepers in American English.

I think the American custom is to refer to "rough sleepers" as "homeless", as well as people who sleep in cars, whereas the couch-surfing people have "housing instability"

"Housing instability" is quite a euphemism!

There's also 'street homeless', which includes all the rough sleepers plus people who "routinely find themselves on the streets during the day with nowhere to go at night. Some will end up sleeping
outside, or in a derelict or other building not designed for human habitation, perhaps for long periods. Others will sleep at a friend’s for a very short time, or stay in a hostel, night-shelter or squat, or spend nights in prison or hospital."
https://england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/48458/Factsheet_Street_Homelessness_Aug_2006.pdf

One of the flats I lived in Glasgow had housing instability, that was down to subsidence though.

"House" as a verb is almost a different word, it's pronounced differently... a bit like "read" (present) and "read" (past tense).

Hows that

"Any more for any more?"

80s prog band Twelfth Night prominently used that phrase in one song so I have a soft spot for it.

"I just want to cover off some key points"

TH you gotta stop or I’ll never make it through a meeting again

"no recipe" recipes is some bullshit I keep seeing amongst my spam email. I'm capable and confident enough to a bit of improv in my kitchen - but even if you are making it up as you go along - It's always a FUCKING RECIPE!

“It’s _____’s world now, we’re just living in it.”

what if, as i increasingly suspect, it's snrub's world

i mean the browns are sort of good now

"aged like milk"

get a new simile

impactful

probably because it is "newish" and it is everywhere and it is usually used in a douchey context

"Say it louder for the people in the back!"

"aged like milk"

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Wednesday, March 24, 2021 1:16 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes this one does seem to have curdled fairly quickly

so ur saying....?

excessive use of literal or literally as an unnecessary appendage to be more emphatic or something. It doesn't really annoy the shit out of me as a regular butcherer of sentence structure, good grammar and spelling, but I just feel like it is overused. I was reading a comment about a convicted sex-offender on twitter on my phone and very briefly misread "literal pedo" as "literary pedo" and then was cheerily imagining Tommy Robinson doorstepping Martin Amis.

Again: calling the ground/the road/the sidewalk/the pavement “the floor”. UK police and their spokespeople seem to be serial offenders here.

"we need to have this conversation"

meaning some vague societal 'conversation' rather than an actual back & forth between two people

"tulip bubble"

There are enough other bubbles to reference that you don't need to keep pointing to one from hundreds of years ago that you're only familiar with because the professor in the one economics class you took pretended to read the book his economics professor assigned him.

tulip bubbles are a specific type of bubble though

it can have more weight to refer to a precedential historical antecedent than to cite beanie babies, depending on the audience or intent of the writing

its also kind of a gross sounding phrase. i agree it's kind of useful though

tulip bubbles are a specific type of bubble though

agreed, and I think the "beanie babies bubble" (if it existed to the extent tulipmania did) is different re the underlying origins and "value" of the thing in question.

The South Sea Bubble is the one that got the bubble name first iirc, so, I also agree with man alive

then there's the Bubble Bobble bubble of 2019-2021

The Teletubble of xmas 2001 was real

Bubble works beautifully as a metaphor for a speculative mania, in that a real life bubble consists of a very small amount of substance inflated to an enormous size.

that wasn't anyone's annoyance but thanks for sharing?

Weirdly, I'm sick of "the venn diagram is a circle" but I will never tire of "time is a flat circle"

we need to establish an ongoing cadence

as part of an ongoing business conversation