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

ach sure nobody should do anything but agree sure

they should probably have to list back a precis of the discussion to ensure they were on message afterwards tbh

i realize i spend a lot of time beating up on "traditional media", but dogged conformance to journalistic style, after it has become abundantly clear that journalistic substance is a dead letter, really does chap my hide. recently i saw the headline "Employee, man brawl inside Chick-Fil-A restaurant in DC". If that's how your style guide tells you to write, you should strongly consider selectively ignoring your style guide.

Headlines are notoriously places where brevity is elevated above grammar and sense.

yeah wtf style guides rule

Re: ‘let’s agree to disagree’: “it is our duty to be inflexible on matters of principle: we owe our friends friendship, we do not owe them weakness.” (Ian Hamilton Finlay)

what is the outcome of that tho

as in i could see it being an argument for or against agreeing to disagree!

when scummy politicians say another one speaks "truth to power" is something I keep hearing recently, even before Andrew Bridgen used it about Boris earlier, I heard it used on another mendacious creep recently.

oftentimes

^ An American Thing

id use bytimes a good bit tbh

maybe I just notice it more for obvious reasons but I've been seeing "lodestar" a lot in non-political articles

I heard someone advocate recently for editing every possible cliche out of one’s writing, and I think it’s a good rule. I think that’s part of what this thread is getting at. We all read more writing from more people every day than at any previous point in history and most of it’s boring.

Conversely, you also run into writing that strains painfully to avoid cliche and to express simple ideas in unusual gimmicky ways and it can be a mess.

I used to use clichés like they were going out of style. Now I avoid them like the plague.

lol

Choreography has always been a lodestar for Ms. Letissier

oh god it's happening to me too

Conversely, you also run into writing that strains painfully to avoid cliche and to express simple ideas in unusual gimmicky ways and it can be a mess.

― mick signals, Wednesday, September 12, 2018 11:52 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is annoying but they are lodestar in comparison

anus champ

LoadStar, the floppy-disk-based magazine for Commodore 64 users, has always been a ... a touchstone for me.

xp that was the exact article that led me to mention it actually

lol i figured it might've been

I'm still waiting to see which Democratic candidate will turn out to be our Lode Runner for Atari 800, Commodore 64, and Apple II systems with at least 64k RAM

Avoid clichés by isolating, quarantining, and thoroughly fumigating them.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dm6vZTJXcAA_W-H.jpg:small

ew

I really want to start responding to 'morning' with a hearty 'well-observed'.

"Hello!"
"Oh, how very original."

Posts that start 'This is huge' followed by some revelation the author is certain will DEFINITELY lead to Trump's impeachment/Brexit being cancelled/whatever

'I'm so sorry for your loss.'
'I'm so sorry for your addiction to clichés. My deepest sympathies!'

(I swear I'm not That Guy. I was properly socialized. Relatively properly, anyway.)

i mean

that is the essential soul of what is good and necessary about cliché, that phrase

it insulates from all of the agonies of misunderstanding of intent or delivery that can arise in just about any phrased or unphrased human interaction and delivers the absolutest clarity and intent, in the most widely recognised formula available, to people least able at that time to process much of anything except perhaps a presence and the delivery of such a phrase.

you would have to have many things wrong with you to not understand implicitly the utility of such a phrase for the circumstances imo

Yeah, ordinarily I appreciate people who avoid formulaic speech, and who can come up with something a trifle more daring at a party than "what do you do?".

But at my mom's funeral two years ago, I found I was not craving variety and creativity in what people said; if someone said something formulaic I found I was relieved and pleased.

I fear that my horribly-formed 'joke' may have provoked the very agony of which deems speaks.

I was bantering with Doc C, do u see

i got it, OL!

but glad it inadvertently prompted dmac and YMP, who articulated something important and an experience i've shared.

if you ever find yourself thinking "how can i condole with somebody in an original and non-cliched way?" then you should strongly consider fucking yourself for eternity

And really, my initial post wasn't exactly fueled by the shit being annoyed out of me. It was more the experience of hearing a word over and over until it sounds like random phonemes disconnected from context and meaning. I'd heard and said 'morning' like twelve times within a five-minute stretch and thought 'huh, humans r weird'.

"convo" for conversation

Good mourning!

oh i am the sincere person missing puns

what a turnup

Was gonna say, thought ol' treesh had gotten your login info for a sec.

I appreciated your impassioned riposte, nonetheless.

Unless you're literally talking about extraction into a liquid, don't say "infuse."

So this is bad:

In a flat world, infused with the complexities of contracting over information, off-the-shelf contracts and standardized legal reasoning and approaches don’t cut it. What’s needed are creative ways to manage strategic relationships. https://t.co/LJ3leh1szb

— Gillian Hadfield (@ghadfield) June 19, 2018

This is fine though:

This shampoo and conditioner is literally infused with love: https://t.co/sUnAt19g76 pic.twitter.com/473mYSVx8X

— InStyle (@InStyle) June 18, 2016

The bigger problem with tweet #1 imo is that it is word barf.

In a flat world, barf is critical to proactively steer our dynamic word logistic advantages.

in a flat world, apparently fields need to be leveled, despite being flat

It requires a means of responding to the very unevenness—the nonflatness—that has persisted, even been exacerbated, in the wake of the ways in which the global platform has rearranged work and resources.

Regardless of the world's shape or what it's been infused with, I feel like it would be difficult to cut anything using only contracts or reasoning. That's not how cutting things works.

For the 21st century, we need virtual contracts literally infused with titanium that can selectively cut the DNA of the blockchain.