Decorator colors. Gourmet kitchen.
When we adopted one of our cats, we had to go through an interview, fill out a questionnaire, and a home visit by a “cat social worker” who checked that our existing kitty was well taken care of and in particular, not declawed.
“Two scoops of raisins”. Really? Exactly how big is the scoop?
“Get a second one free, just pay separate shipping and handling” In other words, it costs more to ship and “handle” your item than it is worth.
Also “vintage” and “retro” for anything old.
“Call in the next 10 minutes and you’ll get…”
That commercial has run 6 times in the last hour - who exactly is resetting the timer to 10 minutes every time it runs in every market across the country?? :rolleyes:
Yeah, I know, but it’s still inane.
That’s a perfectly valid and useful description. It means the item has superficial scratches from handling, but no actual wear from use. For things like machine parts, it means it’s never been installed.
That’s a legal disclaimer, to avoid being sued under truth-in-advertising laws. It means “this box doesn’t contain everything you see in the picture.”
I hate it when my grad students use vague, meaningless qualifiers in technical writing. The most common offenders are “state of the art” and “high quality”.
“Perfect.” :dubious:
Ok, are you judging me? And what do I win now? Your absence?
“Sorry…?” spoken in a hand-on-hip tone with foot-tapping
What are you sorry for? If you didn’t hear me you’d tell me, right? Or is this some passive-aggressive version of a confrontational challenge one step up from “I dare you to say that to me again…”?
Court hearing ?
There’s a lot of censoring and then the beak says some stuff that indicates he/she didn’t hear anything that wasn’t censored anyway.
“Quality” means nothing without a qualifier.
“Quality clothing/TVs/tires/furniture/perpetual-motion machines is yours at Acme.”
Everything has quality, whether good, bad or indifferent.
I seriously doubt anyone lives in any of those cafes that sell “homemade” pie.
JC Whitney, which sells cheap car accessories, used to send out big catalogs in which everything was made of “heavy duty” plastic.
A lot of these are sort of goofy shorthand for concepts that we all understand. Things like “highway miles” are stretching it a little, but even so, if you said that a car had 60% highway miles, the understood meaning is that 60% of the miles on the odometer were ones spent at a relatively high steady speed on a highway of some sort, and that the other 40% were spent in a more herky-jerky stop and go fashion at lower speeds, which is much harder on the car per mile than driving a steady 80 mph.
Of course, people can use the ambiguity to cheat you and say “60% highway miles” when in reality 60% of the miles were racked up on the highway… in stop and go traffic. Technically, they were “highway miles” in that they were driven on a highway, but it does go against the spirit of the phrase.
“Died instantly” is another of these that is prima facie stupid in that everyone does die instantaneously, but in common usage, it’s meant that someone went from alive and healthy to stone dead in an extremely short time, not in some sort of drawn out, suffering-laden way.
The ones that get me are the oxymoronic ones like “homemade pie” made from scratch at a restaurant, or ones that are mealy-mouthed attempts to avoid common phrases like “pre-owned” instead of “used”. Those are just dumb and annoying.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Don’t you mean another question?
One I hear more lately is “even”. As in “We can expect rain today across the area, including East Chicago, Hammond, Merrillville, and EVEN Gary.”
“Executive”. Usually used to describe real estate.
“For Sale By Owner” Really? You mean I can’t buy it from someone that doesn’t own it?
I came in here to say this. I hate, hate, hate, this phrase!
A couple of people have said that everybody dies instantly, but I disagree. I think that almost nobody dies instantly. Most people die over the course of several seconds or several minutes. Of course, it depends on what you mean by “death” / “dying” (and “instant”). Someone can be “clinically dead” due to a stopped heart and respiratory failure without yet being brain dead. And they can be brain dead without yet being metabolically dead.
I think the concept of death is fuzzier than generally assumed. Poetically, life itself has been described as a slow dying. But even if we reject that extreme viewpoint, I think it’s fair to classify dying as a process that usually takes some time.
I think the point there is that it’s being sold directly by the owner, as opposed to via a dealer or agent. Not quite useless.
My pet peeve is “chemical free”. Nothing is chemical free, unless you’re talking about deep intergalactic space, and even that has a tiny amount of hydrogen per cubic meter. INTERGALACTIC CHEMICAL ALERT!
For a house, maybe. For a car, not really.