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

My parents bought my childhood home off the man who came up with “This is the age of the train”.

Blimey, he also did “milk has got a lotta bottle” and “I’m a secret lemonade drinker”

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Rod_Allen_(advertising_executive)

the man who animated the sleepy penguin in the “this is the age of the train” ad used to live directly opposite me

he wasn't elvis costello's dad tho

Julianna Margulies’ dad came up with ‘plop plop, fizz fizz/oh, what a relief it is!’ for Alka-Seltzer.

Hoyt Axton's mother wrote (or cowrote) "Heartbreak Hotel." She was also completely unrelated to Elvis Costello, as far as I know.

I learned an interesting story yesterday about Elvis Costello’s mother getting contraband Lee Konitz records from the US through a Liverpudlian Merchant Marine who later changed his name to Michael Holliday and had a couple of number one UK hits.

Have you read his memoir? It's like 85% about his parentage and family history, 7% about being a person of Irish extraction, and like 5% about having created indelibly exciting New Wave music. Then another 3% of sheer random stuff he has to say about, like, early 20th century passenger ships.

If you open it expecting 300 pages of anecdotes about Nick Lowe or Paul McCartney or the Pogues or T-Bone Burnett, it's a disappointment. But if you just want to let him ramble it's fine.

Something that gets used to death by a couple of the Blue Jays broadcasters: "approach," as in "he's got a great two-strike approach," or "I loved his approach in that at-bat." It's not meaningless, they just use it way too often.

more off-topic milk stuff. i forgot how big a thing the milk marketing board was in the 80s UK:

"Milk Cup – The first major trophy to be sponsored in English football was the League Cup, supported by the Milk Marketing Board between 1981 and 1986."

and

"The Milk Race was the most prestigious cycling event in the British calendar running for 35 years between 1958 and 1993 with sponsorship from the now disbanded Milk Marketing Board."

(the milk race used to come through tewkesbury when i was a lad. and the upcoming 2022 tour of britain is starting a stage there)

"after aligning internally,"

sounds uncomfortable tbh

"i'm conscious of time"

sounds exhausting

lol

I don't find it annoying (yet?), but "gatekeeping" seems to be on the same route to ambiguity-via-overuse as gaslighting

"We've decided to go in a different direction."

They should do what they did in Dilbert

"Knock knock"
"Who's there?"
"Not you, anymore"

"We've decided to go in a different direction."

Ah, yes! We think your [choose one: a) idea b) experience c) talent] is really amazing and fabulous, but we've decided to go in a different direction; we think [stupid, clueless, no-talent] is a better fit for what we have in mind.

"So the direction we've decided to go is . . . down."

I don't find it annoying (yet?), but "gatekeeping" seems to be on the same route to ambiguity-via-overuse as gaslighting

― rob, Wednesday, August 10, 2022 7:16 AM (yesterday)

It is definitely on the same route! It isn't as annoying because the original, potent meaning of gaslighting is a form of intimate abuse, whereas gatekeeping is bureaucratic in nature ... the annoyance (at least my annoyance) is less visceral.

Meanwhile, I have made peace with "ideate" and "cashflow" used as a verb.

However, I am currently annoyed by what I feel is the overuse of "trauma" and "healing"

Gaskeeping meanwhile means holding in a fart

I lack gaskeeping capacity tbh

"We've decided to go in a different direction."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtvGR8UX1L0

"nerd blackface" to describe any show about geeks that insensitively portrays their culture.

like makes me want nerds to get beat up p much

i have not heard this term before. i don't think it will have a nice life.

"it's a moveable feast"

^^^needs my mum to pop her head in and explain at full length which feasts (meaning saints and holy days) are "moveable" and why and how, and how you calculate them

no one's lazy clichetron would survive the info-assault

iow RETVRN

"Capture" to describe a photograph. The comments section on Flickr is full of "Great capture!"

(Also, it sounds like an NPR show: The Takeaway, The Pulse, The Capture...)

I still quote 'this is the age of the train'.

Perhaps it still is!

I like the references upthread to people who made up slogans, plus Ross MacManus.

“say less”

I used to work with an awful but malaproptastic woman who thought the expression was "it's a moveable beast".

I am generally a chilled-out linguistic descriptivist these days, but realised recently that people who aren't PC Copper giving evidence in court using "said" as in "we arrived at said hostelry", annoys me to an irrational extent.

Sounds very Colin Hunt-ish.

mum would have loved "moveable beast" and certainly started saying it herself

I knew a girl from Philly who thought 'might as well' was 'minds a well' and insisted we were all wrong.

she also called 'tennis shoes' "tenor shoes"

#istandwithher

hey, you minds a well

My sister thinks the opposite of ‘closed’ is pronounced OMPEN.

I once had a boss who was so delightfully prone to malapropisms that I kept a running list in a notebook. Unfortunately the only one I can recall right now is: "I hate eating caramel, because the Rembrandts get stuck in your teeth."

She also pronounced "papal" so that it rhymed with "apple."

A papal smear

I used to say "banal" like "anal".

i had a lot of banal sex

'heh, that's wayy above my pay grade'

"what's our playbook on this?"

"knowledge transfer"

― Ottbot jr (NickB), Thursday, December 18, 2014

"the team is complaining about not having enough time for the knowledge transfer - it's been a week"

i overheard a man drinking coffee speak this into a phone, the other day. come on, team, hurry the fuck up! work harder! transfer the fucking knowledge! god damn they're slow

my office is a wellspring of trendy nonprofit jargon gobblygook, but they seem to have finally stopped using 'learnings' in lieu of takeaways..

'So what learnings did we take from the conference?' drove me fucking bananas

Lessonings and Learnings

oh and everybody's a goddamn 'stakeholder' as well

Andy, I yearn longingly for the cuddly nonprofit jargon when I get into a workplace where the jargon is either too military ("after-action") or too sportsy ("playbook").

my team is not so bad, except when my boss says 'awesome sauce' in zoom calls

I usually sleep through the early all-staff zoom meetings, so I'm probably missing out on the newest jargon abuses

oh and everybody's a goddamn 'stakeholder' as well

― Andy the Grasshopper, Friday, September 23, 2022 5:09 PM (yesterday)

i often hear this / read about this in nonprofit articles and discussions on social media, and I envision a group of people wearing pastels standing in a circle holding stakes and discussing who is going to actually kill the vampire lying in the center of the circle