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

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

"Makers"

Something kind of snooty about it, IDK

One of our departments is planning on having "a convening". Meetings are not good enough, I guess.

that sounds like something witches do on the sabbath

having "a convening". Meetings are not good enough, I guess.

they're just throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks

I recently started a job that uses Slack instead of Teams or Skype or whatever, and I am finding that I can't quite abide the term "Huddle."

Like, (a) we are not actually on a football team, and (b) it is uncomfortably close to "cuddle," which... ew.

Commerce somehow existed for thousands of years before everything became either a war metaphor or a sports metaphor.

Like, hi, I am a businessperson wearing a polo shirt and pressing buttons to make different patterns of light appear on a glowing rectangle. I don't need to do an "after-action report" or a "hotwash" or a "postmortem" when I can just say "lessons learned."

I am either in a climate-controlled office or my climate-controlled house. I don't need to talk about "the long pole in the tent" or "the wolf that's closest to the wagon" or "the shark in the water."

at my work they're always doing 'scrums' but I can guarantee nobody knows anything about rugby

They should call ideas "farts"

....hotwash?

A military term, analagous to "after-action" or "postmortem" or "lessons learned."

Like, I guess you are supposed to wash your guns or planes or tanks or whatever after a battle? I dunno, I just move pieces of paper around while wearing a tie.

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Hotwash

arms too short to hotwash with god

sounds more like hogwash to me

One of our departments is planning on having "a convening". Meetings are not good enough, I guess.

― Look closely, that is all. (doo dah), Wednesday, March 29, 2023 10:33 AM (three days ago)

I've seen "convening" used in place of "conference" for awhile ... not sure what differentiates a convening from a conference, or if the people that started using it just got bored of calling conferences "conferences" so they decided to use another word to mean the same thing ... but it generally doesn't refer to the getting together of people who all work together already.

I recently started a job that uses Slack instead of Teams or Skype or whatever, and I am finding that I can't quite abide the term "Huddle."

Like, (a) we are not actually on a football team, and (b) it is uncomfortably close to "cuddle," which... ew.

lol! Also the topics that one would "huddle" about if one were to "huddle" would be absurd to think about it in the context of a literal "huddle" ... one of my jobs uses Slack as well, and recently there have been problems with the HVAC system (someone turned off the central heat and no one can figure out how to turn it back on again) and it would be funny to have a Huddle about it being cold.

it doesn't 'annoy the shit out of me' so much, but lately I've seen "the hits keep coming" to suggest a stream of positive events. (two different people in one day!)

i've always used it and interpreted it the exact opposite way - it describing a situation where bad thing after bad thing keeps happening, in sarcastic fashion.

is this a reclamation project?

I guess it started straight then got sarcastic? Maybe the new earnestness is finally here.

i've always used it and interpreted it the exact opposite way - it describing a situation where bad thing after bad thing keeps happening, in sarcastic fashion.

is this a reclamation project?

my instinct is that the non-sarcastic use is a product of stupidity?

“the hits keep coming” is a radio cliché, talking about the number of pop smash hits they’re playing on a row. its repurposing could go either way really, it’s just a linguistic construction to riff on

IN a row

just like DUCKS!

the ducks keep coming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZt5AXpLM2g