I don’t like baby talk e.g. “sammies” for sandwiches. So cringey.
When someone starts a response with “Um,” in an effort to be condescending, I picture them as a gum snapping junior high school snotty little thing. Just go away.
The phrase “lean in” is just unbearable.
Lots of people rail against this, but it doesn’t bother me at all. Its almost always obvious which meaning is meant (and if it isn’t, that is the fault of the speaker, not the expression) and it’s deeply embedded in the language.
Okay, I’ll take the plunge. I can’t STAND it when the mother of any creature is referred to as “the mama.” The mama deer this, the mama cat that, the child is looking for his mama. Makes the speaker sound like a four year old.
anywho…
And last but not least… last but not least. When Germans speak English in front of an audience they are incapable of *not *saying it, but they are not the only ones to overuse it. I wonder when that got started. Does anybody know who I can blame?
Gah that’s another one that gets me. Same old boss mentioned upthread is guilty of all of the above, as well as “I’d love to help with this project, but I just don’t have the bandwidth right now”. :mad:
I aspire to your level of Zen. Truly, I hope the day will come when meaningless grammatical errors & annoying phrases will no longer phase me. Goals.
Or as I always say near the end of student presentations: “And last, but somehow, in a trope-busting move, still least… Christopher.”
I’m a teacher… I get paid to insult kids.
Here are some from the education community. First, “compare and contrast.” English teachers and social studies teachers love this phrase. However, the definition of every dictionary in my English teacher’s room stated this definition- Compare: to find out or point out how persons or things are alike and how they differ. I swear, as God is my witness, I have used high school science texts and materials that adhered to that definition. I had to explain the English teachers’ mistake to my students.
Also, there are always some days before the students show up for school in the summer (hey, it’s early August these days) and after they leave in the spring that teachers and other faculty have to show up. In Georgia, these are absurdly called “pre-planning” and “post-planning.” Isn’t all planning “pre-” by definition? “Post-planning” is just ridiculous, but schools persist with these terms.
A few complaints that I take exception to …
Except that the original meaning of the word (in the modern sense of computer hacking) was absolutely not related to anything criminal or in any way destructive, but rather the clever creations of (usually) nerdy but very bright programmers. That sense of the word originated at MIT (I believe back in the days of the Tech Model Railroad Club) and while it often meant a clever prank, it also came to mean a quick but clever fix to a software program, typically bypassing and rather proudly flouting normal software engineering methodologies. It’s still often used in that sense, where if someone talks about a software change that might take weeks to go through software change process formalities, someone else may boast that “I can do a hack in five minutes” – and in certain techno-cultures that carries the enviable connotation of being both a non-conformist rebel and a technical guru.
It doesn’t have to mean a complete literal encirclement, IMHO, even if it’s about something physical. “The facts surrounding this incident” seems perfectly reasonable to me. Also, “this fine product is available in stores throughout Hicksville and the surrounding area” is also fine, even if Hicksville has the shores of a body of water or an uninhabited forest on one side, so that the fine product is definitely not available in all directions!
Any expression can be annoying if used to excess. That being said, this expression conveys the useful information that the writer recognizes an apparent contradiction, but asserts that, in reality, two apparently contradictory facts can be reconciled and can both be true.
Just for a change, I’m totally with you on that one! Can I reach out to Bob in accounting? No, my arms are not quite that long, but I might be able to manage it if you hand me a ten-foot grappling hook. 
The problem with “reaching out” is that it combines the worst of useless biz-speak with useless pandering politically-correct-speak, as in “I have worked to reach out to this community”, which means … exactly nothing. Heaven forfend that the person be forced to say something like “I have met and spoken with …” which raises questions about what exactly was said and/or promised in these meetings, questions that would be uncomfortable if no meetings ever occurred or nothing of substance was ever said. In that case, what you were really doing was empty posturing or, to coin a phrase, “reaching out”! 
“Soooo yummy!!!” - makes me want to, well, maybe not scream, but at least yell. Sounds like a 5-year-old. It hurts to even look at what I wrote.
I’m reminded of George Carlin’s comments about airline lingo like calling passengers for “pre-boarding”. What is that? Do they get to board before they board?
Maybe if they pre-board early enough they might even catch the crew doing pre-flight pre-planning!
(bolding mine)
I think you mean “faze me.”
PS: Love you, Gaudere!
Damn you!!! What I really meant was that my annoyance at such trivial nonsense will be phased out…
Oh, god knows other things annoy me although, like people cutting me up in traffic, I try not to let it bother me.
One that does make me twitch, though, is “on accident” instead of “by accident”. I’m not sure where it came from, but my kids both use it so I suspect YouTube.
(I seem to have forgotten how to use the multi-quote function)–
Periwinkle writes, “I don’t like baby talk e.e. ‘sammies’ for sandwiches. So cringey.”
Various mentions in this thread – as above – of ways of expressing things, which strike people as off-puttingly babyish. (I’m taking it that this thread is essentially light-hearted: with people recognising that their feelings about things like this are in fact, irrational and disproportionate: just, “we hate what we hate, whether it makes sense or not” – for me, hates of mine mentioned here, are of that order.)
I’m British – while I like more Americanisms than I don’t, there are some which (no doubt, quite irrationally) do the “cringe” thing to me, because they strike me as utterly infantile. As with Periwinkle’s gripe above: a “sandwich” variant quite often found on American message boards, is “sammich”. I loathe it, to the point of wanting to get violent; because of what I feel to be, its sheer babyishness. “See with my head”, that this is subjective, and makes little sense – the favourite British-English diminutive for the same object is “sarnie”, which could be seen as equally childish, but for some reason doesn’t bother me.
Something which I’ve probably mentioned before: the colloquial word meaning “over-fussy, usually about trivial things”: in British English, “pernickety”; in American ditto, “persnickety”. I like the British form perfectly well; but the American form strikes me – just because of one extra letter – as quite cringe-makingly baby-talk-ish. I don’t think anyone is claiming that this stuff makes any discernible sense…
So you’d probably hate Australia. Although I can’t vouch for how often these are used, never having been to Australia, the weirdest sounding for me is “bikie” unironically used for “biker” with all its hardcore connotations even though it sounds like a babyism to me.
using ‘prolly’ instead of ‘probably’ is something I have seen a lot recently. very annoying.
And even worse, yummers. Yuck!
I think you’re not getting the proper gist of the expression “apples and oranges”. Sure they’re both fruit. But to anyone who eats both they are NOTHING alike. Both being fruits is so superficial a comparison as to be meaningless. This is why we don’t compare them.
I’m sick of reading “doubled down” in almost every news article dealing with politics. Even The Economist, which I would think should be above such informal language, uses it quite often.