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

Four Words: Use Other Words Please
"Use other words please."
Commonly used phrases that inexplicably bug you
Most irritating cliche/phrase/expression
"Taking Things to a Whole `Nother Level!"
words that annoy
Words that should earn the author a slap
PROVERBIAL and other tip offs to poor writing

-- caitlin (wpsal...) (webmail), December 23rd, 2003. (caitlin)

Oh yes, yes yes. I second that one. And the people who say it, say it over and over.

I also have a horror of people who write prolifically in all caps.

This is true.

But, this is a topic that should be dealt with routinely and harshly... the only way we can correct the language and suppress it's organic growth is by exposing and banning every new usage as it occurs... Isn't that what the French do?

Also: 'fridge,' girls who refer to each other as 'girl,' proactive...i'll be back when i think of more....

'poetic justice'. Used by the lazy to describe all 'justice' the speaker approves of, instead of a particular type. The adjective is rendered meaningless.

Agree re 'bird' for woman/girl, and lament its threatened return. Stinks of 'I'm being un-PC, where's my medal?'. Also the C-person uses it, which kinda ends the argument.

Wait, huh? Fridge is the thing you put food in, whats wrong with it?

I'm picturing him saying things such as "Would you like me to remove another beverage from the refrigerator for you, whilst we watch some association football?"

like no consideration to the fact that the bad memories don't magically just go away even if you do generate some new positive memories in the same environment and may be an obstacle to putting yourself in that environment again.

Unpopular opinion: [something completely obvious and uncontroversial]

As far as coded goes … is there a particular usage that bothers you? I am going to assume it’s not the emergency room one.
― sarahell, Thursday, December 12, 2024 3:54 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I assume it's the analytical/academic usage, like "queer-coded," "white-coded," etc.

Tired of every minor life tip being referred to as a "cheat code"

is it better or worse than lifehack?

Better, marginally

"Unpopular opinion: [something completely obvious and uncontroversial]"

My fave internet thing is still that whole "Make fun of me all you want but i actually LIKE Abba!"

even better if you mention that they are a "guilty pleasure" because then you can have 100 responses on social media from people saying that they also love Abba and that they don't believe in guilty pleasures if you like something you like it you know what i mean...

its still a really easy way to get a big response from people on social media. i don't know if people do it for that reason though.

i can abide cheat codes and lifehacks when they're actually unexpected and innovative. but too often it's like "lifehack: keep your perishable food in the refrigerator and it will actually last longer!"

I assume it's the analytical/academic usage, like "queer-coded," "white-coded," etc.

This has become more widespread in the last few years on social media and other non-academic contexts. A recent example that comes to mind is a tweet from Jeremy O. Harris calling the spate of celebrity lookalike contests "so Great Depression era coded."

In some ways, it doesn't seem that different from "It's giving..." It's become another way of saying something is evocative of something else.

Yes agree. Also this

A recent example that comes to mind is a tweet from Jeremy O. Harris calling the spate of celebrity lookalike contests "so Great Depression era coded."

...is hilarious. And true?

"Giving" used this new way is jarring for me but comprehensible.

I try to hear it as an abridged version of "giving a ___ vibe."

Cohort … I realized that I dislike it in the way that the moist-haters dislike “moist”

It's become another way of saying something is evocative of something else.

― jaymc, Monday, December 16, 2024 1:12 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Giving isn't really new at all. It's been used this way in black/latino LGBTQ ballroom culture and drag circles since the 80s it's just recently been adopted by everyone else. I have to imagine Drag Race played a part in that. I don't mind it but I do mind when it's used incorrectly.

I saw an Italian restaurant with a sign of pasta that said "It's giving pasta." Nope. It isn't giving pasta. It's actually just fucking pasta.

It’s fucking pasta?

lol

It's giving tree

https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-yto0giq5nx/images/stencil/640w/products/3547/6963/4520giving-2__34597.1627886610.jpg

I only started hearing it about 3 years ago from queer club scene people … so (apologies to budo jeru), I named a fundraising campaign for an arts org I worked for “It’s Giving Giving” … I don’t think enough people got the reference…. Looking at other promotional campaigns/marketing emails from the time, the only other one I saw using that expression was the Betsey Johnson brand … now it is a lot more popular.

I think maybe it was centered in NYC … anyway ENBB otm

if you hear slang in American English, just assume it's taken from queer and/or Black communities, that's where like 90% of it comes from and that's been true for probably 100 years now

I've noticed 'flowers' a, er, bunch in the last year or so - particularly in football podcasts - as in 'we need to give Bukayo Saka flowers for his performance'. I quite liked it initially but I might have had enough of it now.

The better usage is ‘come get your flowers’ - meaning that praise is past due. Whether this applies to Sam’s, I couldn’t say.

In my experience I've seen this coming from (again) parts of the Black community and is a reference to funeral flower arrangements and the outpouring of appreciation and memorializing that comes after someone passes on; it's saying, do the appreciation while they're here to receive it and be appreciated instead of after it's too late.

I first heard it on Ian Wright's podcast, where he has predominantly other pundits of colour involved, and figured it had come from Black culture. I'm totally here for that, of course. It's just when it becomes ubiquitous that I start to get wound up by stuff like it - as in, he scored a goal, flowers, or, he tied his shoelaces, flowers!

Pointlessly grouchy obviously, but that's what the thread's for, so...

No yeah that's kind of silly. I'm not saying you shouldn't be annoyed by bad usage!

Oh, I know you weren't - that was a more general hedge for if I sounded like I was being dumb and grouchy!

Feel the need to interject: just because a piece of slang or new usage comes from a certain culture doesn’t mean it belongs to that culture, but simply that it has some origins in that culture. I know that no one has said this, but especially in the queer world, I get tired of people proclaiming ownership over language, particularly because half of the time, that ownership is false. Acknowledging origins is wonderful, proclaiming ownership is scary imho.

For example, some years ago somebody posted an infographic claiming that white people should know that the term “salty” in its contemporary meaning comes from Ballroom culture, but as a queer history buff, the origins of this term date back to Polari, where the rough and tumble ways of sailors/navymen as trade who ‘went from port to port’ gave rise to the term as we now know it.

good post imo and otm imo

Kind of like the Irish claiming "craic"?

If people were respectful and kept in mind that language does have origins and things can have special meanings for groups that you're not part of, we wouldn't even be having conversations about who "owns language." Probably. Agree "ownership" is not a useful concept but people being shitheads really flattens all the nuance out of things.

Agree with Table and this position should of course be extended to music as well. This is on my mind as I just read that Mary Lou Williams, one of my historical jazz heroes was dismissive (to say the least) about white jazz musicians.

I just read that Mary Lou Williams, one of my historical jazz heroes was dismissive (to say the least) about white jazz musicians.

But also Ahmad Jamal! I read that piece too; it was wild.

Culture in America hangs off an ownership framework now though, with a judiciary and police force girding it. Once money or your livelihood is part of the equation, ownership of culture (like slang/jargon) is going to be a contested thing. If you don't defend it, someone else will (via expertise working in that ownership framework) take it from you and cut you out of its extracted value. There's a reason you see those talismanic posts on social media where people assert ownership of their content or bitter fights about attribution on Twitter. Yeah people care about language attribution as a thing itself, but I think the conflict is generally more rooted in historically and materially disadvantaged cultural groups being on high alert (with good reason) about getting ripped off. Getting noticed is flattering, but if you're historically prey it also signals the predators are now aware of you.

I understand that, but no one “owns” language just as no one “owns” cuisine. To think so is to deny the mutable, to deny combination, to deny the very act of creation itself.

i can see both aspects of this, and find figuring out where the one ends and the other begins to be both fascinating and pertinent. however, i would never have that discussion on this board lol

You’ll think you’ll get a better one anywhere else? :)

to deny that ownership occupies territory in linguistic praxis is to deny that people have motivations for using language

if 'ownership' is construed in the legal framework that it usually occupies, then I have a hard time seeing how it applies to language. if it is construed much more loosely as involving 'having a share of interest in its use, but not a controlling interest', then yes I agree that kind of ownership exists, but since it has no effective mechanism of control it's an ownership that's too diffuse to have an identifiable owner.

Pretty confident Table is very familiar with this issue, f hazel. Maybe more than anyone else on ILX idk…

I am now officially old because I am less annoyed and more just confused by these things. Like salty is some Robert Louis Stevenson era term for sailors and sailorish speech. … It later got conferred on rural farmers iirc.

I see these older uses appear in “trendy” speech and memes and just think … why did this come back? … like shenanigans… and more recently, demure.

It sometimes feels like I live on some secluded island and receive messages in bottles using contemporary language trends and I read the message, and I understand it, more or less, and that’s about it lol

people assert ownership of language all the time in the real world, and their claims are backed up not just by law but also language speakers themselves, not sure why this is a problematic statement to be honest... just saying it's true doesn't mean I personally think it's a good thing

Are you speaking of copyrighted works or other language recognized as proprietary? Because everyday spoken, conversational language doesn't get legally recognized as owned and protected that I'm aware of, as in who owns the English language?

Language gets claimed as owned and these claims of ownership are enforced by the people that speak it and respected by people that don't, this is an everyday fact of language across the entire world and throughout history. Legal systems often get involved in these claims of ownership. You say nobody owns the English language, my knowledge of the history of dialects like AAVE and other nonstandard Englishes tells me that is not and has never been an widely-accepted position or everyday reality. America is rife with people asserting ownership of the English language. This thread is a decades-old example of the phenomenon? The Hopi community didn't find the concept to be so cut-and-dried when a Hopi language dictionary was published by Arizona University Press:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_Dictionary/Hop%C3%ACikwa_Lav%C3%A0ytutuveni

Whether it is widely-accepted or not flies in the face that it is everyday reality— if you use language in the public sphere, then that is opening the language to recombination and usage that might not arrive from he language’s original users or in its original context. Sometimes this opening and usage by an “other” is nefarious, but more often, it is not, and is simply part of a process of language distribution, and often points to appreciation for the original users’ ingenuity.

This is not to deny the colonial and imperial elements of English language distribution— that is certainly always present.

The Hopi case you bring up has a different element to it, because it isn’t a language or dialect that is used outside of a small population, and so its potential for recombination and appropriation are minimal.

I’m also just going to say something controversial: people who claim “ownership” of a word or phrase in the English language are, simply put, wrong.

Shakespeare gets credited with coining/inventing words and phrases; surely most were things he heard and was simply the first to write down.

Presumably from the equivalent of queer and POC spaces; ye olde dance clubs and whatnot

Exactly— the issue is that just as settler culture lays claim to certain elements of language and usage, the replication of that ownership mindset, while understandable, does not reflect either the way language actually works, nor does it do any favors to language’s continuous evolution.

Do I believe that certain words should be off-limits to certain people based on identity markers? Sure. If someone calls me a “faggot” in a derogatory way and they aren’t queer, I absolutely have the right the call them on it and/or punch them.

But take a term like “kiki,” which I have seen people “lay claim” to— like the aforementioned “salty,” its origins and meanings have mutated over time since its origins in the 1930s.

What those who are asking for “ownership” of language are missing is that etymology itself often denies their claims. Language is mutable, and any who try to prevent mutation and recombination are actually acting against language and its most interesting qualities.

Bleh, need coffee, sorry for obvious mistakes in that post lol

America is rife with people asserting ownership of the English language. This thread is a decades-old example of the phenomenon?

Like I remember 13 years ago or so when Branwell started using the term Mansplain … and there was a lot of hostility to it … and now it is accepted.