Last year I blogged about how the Ledbury poetry festival asked poets to reveal their most hated words. This year at the festival, the spotlight was on words and phrases that have become so hackneyed and overused that they’ve lost all their meaning. Favorites—actually, least favorites—included: “awesome” and “thinking outside the box” as well as two of my top pet peeves: “literally” and ”devastating.” Half the damn time when people say “literally”, they’re still just speaking figuratively. “Devastated” is so painfully overused that people say they’re devastated when they’re lost their wallet or their favorite team didn’t make the playoffs.
My nomination, which does not appear in this list, would be “tragic.” Thanks to cable news, every fucking thing is tragic, particularly death and especially celebrity death (Princess Diana’s death? Not tragic.) The word has lost all sense of proportion and veered sharply away from the original literary meaning of tragedy, in which a good person loses everything or suffers greatly because of his hubris, or conflicts with a force greater than himself. Seriously, if I see another local news story hyping “a tragic accident on the Major Deegan Expressway”, I’m going to call the station and freak out. I’m also completely over the word “like”, which only has two legitimate uses, as a verb or as part of a simile. If you use it as, like, an interjection or a stopgap because you’re, like, inarticulate, you need to, like, cut that shit out.
Got a cliche you want to call out? Words that are so overused they should be retired…or at least given a long sabbatical? It’ll be tragic—literally, I’ll be, like, devastated—if you don’t share in the comments.
I swear, if I hear “Epic” to talk about something vaguely interesting / cool, I will lose it.
Epic, YES. Also incredible and amazing; they’ve become such blunt-force superlatives. Incredible = great? What next, incredulous = feeling great?
In the category of overused (and annoying), from the loud guy at the desk next to mine: irregardless. Yes, some people consider it acceptable. I want to throw things at him, shouting “Improper yoking!”
To be fair, we are an IS/IT department, and it may be too much to ask that he not butcher (my preferred version of) the english language.
“I’m spiritual, not religious.” Really. Interesting.
“It is what it is” – favored by mansplainers and assholes everywhere to excuse their bad behavior.
There are way too many cliches when it comes to music journalism. E.g.: cerebral. Organic. Ugh. Most of the time music journalism is a game of thesaurus dipping though.
When it comes to fashion writing: unique style. Fashionista. Vintage delight. Sometimes vintage is not delightful! Sometimes it screams OLD WORN PIECE OF CLOTHING WITH MUSTY ODOUR.
“Unconstitutional.” Its inevitable, unconditional usage in 80% of policy conversations is the new version of Godwin’s Law.
@rodriguez: That statement always screamed to me, “I’m too dumb to read, and my weekend partying makes it hard to get to church, but I still want to feel warm fuzzies at Christmas.”
There’s a certain amount of this that can’t be avoided, though. Slang appropriates or creates words and assigns them meaning because there’s a need, right? Then people get tired of that coinage and drop it, or it becomes embedded in the language.
“more than ever” This one has died down a bit, now, but for the first ten years after 9/11, it littered the language with nonsensical superlatives. Most things weren’t “more than ever,” it was just that our awareness of the cultural context had shifted to where it probably should have been all along.
I totally agree on ‘thinking outside the box’.
I think I’m guilty of using ‘like’ too much, but I blame it on being a child in the 90s.
Not exactly a cliche, but when people say, ‘who can judge?’ or variations thereof, it annoys me because we all judge at times, and claiming you don’t just seems ridiculous.
@rodriguez: I don’t love that phrase either, but most of the people I know who use it mean to say that they don’t have a religion but still think about the big questions in life. Which shouldn’t be something you have to explain, but a surprising number of people seem to think that if you don’t go to a church you’re just uninterested in life, death and all the rest.
@BearDownCBears: I see your “unconstitutional” and raise you any reference to free speech or the First Amendment, since 95% of references to either—especially on-line—are just some asshole trying to defend himself when his assholery backfires on him.
@elibard: Pretty much any politician/talking heads’ Giuliani-style “noun, verb, 9/11″ references should be banned, IMO. I think only about 1% of them are actually relevant to the event itself.
@Becky: Close second are “will of the people,” which means he’s run out of arguments, and “this is a HUMAN RIGHT!” which means he’s run out of data.
@BearDownCBears “will of the people,” which means they’ve run out of arguments, and “this is a HUMAN RIGHT!” which means they’ve run out of data wait is that original to you? I am so stealing that.
“It’s all about…”
Gaaaaaa, that annoys me.
To elaborate on Camilla Peffer: the misuse/qualification of “unique,” as in “sooooo unique!” or “really unique” or whatever. Unique is a superlative term. There are no degrees of unique-ness. Also? That thing you bought off Etsy for your wedding or whatever is not unique. The crafter made two dozen of them. And two dozen other crafters made some, too.
no PhDork don’t make me think about my Etsy habit too much!
Anything that is “I’m with a little “. If I never have to hear shit like “I’m catholic with a little c” or any of that ilk again it would be too soon.
@MA – …what do people even mean by that? That they’re “including a wide variety of things; all-embracing”?
Webinar. Just seeing it irritates me!
I disagree on Princess Diana, though I don’t think it was any more tragic than the sudden violent death of any other 37-year-old. But the word is overused. “Hero” too.
@baraquiel- yeah, they kinda mean that. It’s a pretty common phrase among Roman Catholics of a more liberal persuasion, meant to indicate that they are much more accepting than the Church would like/approves of.
@rodriguez- it is terribly overused, and I’m completely guilty of it- because I can’t really find another way to say where I am beliefs-wise. I’ve had to give up on pretty much every organised religion, but I believe there’s a spiritual aspect to the world in a bones-deep way that no amount of my beloved science has ever shaken. I’m trying to find out what that means to me. But when people ask, I always end up defaulting to “yeah, I’m spiritual but not religious.” I’m not entirely sure why.
@Magpie I get it, you’re looking for a concise way to capture a complex idea.
Can I be nerdy for a minute?
There’s a always a balance to strike between truth and clarity. We can’t have both, surprisingly. I suppose the reason to quit using cliches is that they already sacrifice truth. Next, all the clarity goes out of them, due to overuse.
/nerdery
Also, Endora’s comment is really insightful. We shouldn’t have to explain that a person without religion still considers big questions in life, and yet, we do.
Some of this sounds like linguistic prescriptivism, which we don’t really need.
Using “literally” to mean “figuratively” is pretty silly, but the non-literary use of “tragic” seems like a pretty standard expansion of meaning.
@Sara: the non-literary use of “tragic” seems like a pretty standard expansion of meaning.
Perhaps, but it’s overused to the point of ridiculousness, IMO. You may have noticed that nearly all these comments are opinions about language and what we personally don’t like. No one’s trying to create or enforce normative practices, and certainly none of us are in any position of authority to do so, so calling that prescriptivism seems like an overreach (and at any rate, a certain amount of linguistic prescriptivism is positive and necessary, IMO, so if that’s how you want to describe what you think I’m doing, fine.)
Well, here’s something I’ve been wondering: Sometimes, I will use the word literally to emphasize/acknowledge the ridiculousness of a situation or my reaction to it. I know the use of literally here is technically incorrect, but that’s what makes it kind of absurd/funny, right?
For example, in complaining about traffic on the way home, which I know is a low level complaint to begin with, I might say, “Oh man, there were 5 billion cars on the road tonight! It was horrible!” Perhaps dumb to begin with, and I certainly wouldn’t expect a newscaster to go with this usage, but… I think I understand what people mean when they use it this way. They are simply exaggerating for effect.
Probably I should just stop this, but do others see it this way, too? When I hear people use literally this way, this is what I’m hearing. Am I just completely off base in my understanding? My theory *seems* to make sense to me… :O)
@PetiteXL: I think you’re right that it started off as people being deliberately funny and hyperbolic by misusing the word. I literally think that!
@BeckySharper: Thanks for the feedback/confirmation. I’ve begun to stop myself from using the word this way, because I worry that some people don’t get it when I’m simply using it hyperbolically.
Even beyond that, though, my use of the word (albeit tongue in cheek) is becoming my own, personal cliche so it’s probably wise for me to stop.
Maybe this one is for people who have been marking social sciencey student essays, but the word “arguably” when said essays do not engage in argument or is being argued plausibly.
I tend to overuse “awesome” and “fail” – but so far I haven’t been picked up on using this.. Instead I think it’s seen as a part of me and how I communicate (albeit in less formal situations).
On C/catholic: I refer to myself as an A&P Jew; I borrowed that from my entirely lapsed (not even ashes and palms) Catholic girlfriend.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure 125 years ago people were complaining that “pretend” means “lie” and “supposed to” means “believed to,” dammit.