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

FWIW I don't like Matterface and think he's a bad development. Maybe the best to be said of him is that he produces strange phrases that are almost surreally gauche. Today he said something about Arsenal dreaming of special summer days.

OTOH, TBF, his comment 'The School of Science is capable of going nuclear' was actually fine, in the genre of absurd pre-prepared lines.

But if Calzino and I are to have a TalkSport party then it will probably have to involve him.

i didn't realise he was on TalkSport tbf, i haven't listened to it in ages because of the ads and the overwhelming self-promotion

I'm a guilt-free gambler but my betting stakes are so small these days it hardly matters, every so often I'll win a grand or two and then very slowly give it them back to them with added interest.

lol I was checking if Hawskbee & Jacobs are still on TalkSport and it seems Hawksbee has recently been in trouble with HMRC over unpaid taxes. When I got my first fancy dab radio 20 years ago I went through a TalkSport period to my shame!

I can remember one Christmas they had a recorded one-off discussion that was billed as some kind of intellectual heavyweights of TalkSport special! Who I think were James Whale, Mike Parry and someone else whom I can't remember.

they're terrible for clickbait nonsense opinions, i assume they don't still employ Jamie O'Hara but he feels like about their level

Jamie O'Hara is still there, I believe.

even better

folk payola

...people saying "Obsessed with" as in "Obsessed with Kate Bush putting instructions for how to listen to her albums on the sleeve" and I know they're not really obsessed with it, it's just something they thought was notable and might get some likes but I still want to shout back "No, you're not".

i'm getting close to my saturation level on this as well, for similar reasons. i want people to actually BE obsessed with things when they say they are, because being obsessed is a really...i'm not going to say i think it's good because i realize being obsessed with things can often lead to terrible results. but it is very possible to get obsessed with certain things in life and really go down a wormhole and learn everything you can about it, try to learn it inside out and have all this knowledge about something really specific. it's just such a weird human thing, i love it.

on the other hand, I’m Obsessed With Bad Bunny’s Dad Jeans at the Grammys

i want to click that vogue article link and enter the mind of someone who is truly obsessed with those dad jeans

in the future everyone will become obsessed with things for 15 minutes

don't forget 'low-key obsessed', it's like the diet/decaf version

"trash panda"

oh hilarious you came up w/ a new term for a mammal that you now have beaten to death for 10 years

I don't like thinking of animals being beaten to death at all, let alone for 10 straight years ... though that reminds me of the dead baby jokes where there are parts of one dead baby in 10 trash cans.

where on earth are you encountering such concepts, and why

if you say 'semiotics' i promise to believe you : /

the dead baby jokes that were popular when we were kids?

Q: What's grosser than gross?
A: A dead baby in a trash can

Q: What's grosser than that?
A: 10 dead babies in a trash can

Q: What's grosser than that?
A: One dead baby in 10 trash cans

sometimes it's a blender and not a trash can

how do you make a dead baby float

what's grosser than gross and can't turn corners?

dead baby with a spear through it

kinda worried that i will now associate this joek with sarahell forever

Xpost

Similarly,

Q. What's black, white and red and can't get through a revolving door?
A. A nun with a spear through her head.

this might be a sports-centric one, but i've been noticing a rising usage of "throws up" and a synonym for "produces". it's getting to be common in baseball writing, for example, "the first basemen was highly successful in 2022, throwing up a .289/.342/.472 line on the year"

but i also have seen it used, increasingly, in non-sports contexts. i know i should throw up some examples but it's hard to google

throw up watch 2023

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

maybe it sometimes happens during art lectures? "here, let me just throw up an image by van gogh on the screen here..."

it's definitely an informal thing but every single time i think of vomit

I've heard it in meetings where someone (generally a consultant type) is sharing something of value on their screen ... and at least once the screenshare content also made me think of vomit, along with the phrase "throw up" on the screen

throw up watch! "let me throw up something new you've probably never seen before"

i just ate taco bell so i will comply in 20 mins

I have spent approximately 40 years of my life deeply involved in publishing, print production, and typography. Including a time when typesetting was done mostly by hand and by humans. One of my private joys is seeing a line break or page break that introduces a delightful temporary ambiguity of meaning.

Military history is weirdly full of these moments, partly because military language is very evocative and rife with double entendre. So let us explore some sentences with a delightfully ambiguous line break.

For example, in nonfiction about the Civil War you might have a sentence that goes

The 14th Brigade ascended the heights and immediately began throwing up

Which is a bit odd until you turn the page and the next word is

breastworks.

Then a few pages later you might have something equally hilarious, or even more hilarious, like

The Fifth Alabama Regiment succeeded in beating off

Which is funny until you turn the page and the next word is

the attack of the Seventh Maine.

throw up watch! "let me throw up something new you've probably never seen before"

― President of Destiny Encounters International (Karl Malone), Thursday, February 16, 2023 10:42 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i just ate taco bell so i will comply in 20 mins

― waiting for a czar to fall (Neanderthal), Thursday, February 16, 2023 10:47 AM (yesterday)

I have definitely seen taco bell vomit before ... the one near me has drivethru open til 3am ... so y'know

tool kit used to refer to things that aren't really tools ... like a powerpoint slide deck or clickbait quality "how to do x" web pages.

yeah we have an orientation one which is basically a module of awkwardly stitched together info dumps of what to expect in your first 30 days. there are no tools in the damn thing.

i have the worst Baader-Meinhof over 'use case' lately. i must have seen it in texts/articles around 10 times in the past week, and i just HATE it! why not just say 'application' or 'purpose' or something?! oh my god. isn't it derived from software engineering or something? ugh.

Maybe programmers like it cause application makes them think of something else.

"culture bearers" -- i only started hearing/seeing this in the past year, so maybe it's something that i will find less annoying in time, but, atm it is annoying because:

1.when spoken it sounds like "culture bears" and it sounds absurd because it is spoken very reverentially, and in my mind i am thinking about cartoon bears
2.every person comes from a culture and is a "bearer" of that culture; this term posits than only certain people are considered to be this
3.it's part of the instrumentalization of the arts to solve social problems -- white supremacy and all of the things that are tied up in that -- as opposed to funding/supporting the arts for their own sake AND funding/supporting work to solve social problems through other mechanisms, which could include the arts

culture bears sound good tho

obv your other points are solid

xp i guess it's a scarcity mentality ... like, instead of giving funding to artists, the funding can also go to cartoon bears.

cartoon bears as the cultural gatekeepers of our era

it is less annoying than "creatives" tbh ... now that i think about one in the context of the other ... "culture bearers" is coming from a well-intentioned place, in that it is trying to serve as a way to support historically oppressed people. "Creatives" just makes me think about hell is other people.

Fear not, I bear you no culture

i'm generally a hater of this thread for a bunch of reasons but it's a useful distinction to draw maybe, language that feels awkward because it's (badly) trying to illuminate the marginalised vs language that sucks because it's trying to justify the downpressors

There are all sorts of valid use cases for this thread in theory but it’s still entirely bad

Tell you what I don’t like tho, when ppl change the cromulent phrase “shit sandwich” to “compliment sandwich” but they are referring to the same thing where the negative feedback is in the middle — nobody calls a ham sandwich a bread sandwich you dorks! Eat shit!! This concludes your annual review!

too close to home at the moment, that.

three slices of shit tho

cartoon bears as the cultural gatekeepers of our era

Hey hey boo boo

normally this whole thread is Ranger Smith but yeah

just heard 'pre-mortem' as a form of pre-product launch analysis to identify possible failures

i guess it makes sense. i haven't been in that world in several years, not sure common it is, but it immediately made my chest tighten up

lol it sounds as if they are expecting the product to fail