“…at this point in time.”
I used to count the number of times this professor used “the way in which” in her lectures.
That seems to me to be a legitimate grammatical construct, though, rather than a cutesy idiom. I don’t immediately see how you could express it better.
It’s just the number of times you hear it from one person that made me notice. No I didn’t say it was grammatically incorrect. It’s just that when you notice someone’s heavy habitual usage of certain phrase it becomes another thing that you notice besides the content… a kind of distraction.
I can muster up a decent hatred toward all of these except one: whatnot.
I think it’s very useful.
And whatnot.
mmm
Really!?
Just sayin’
Kinda awesome
(The word is miles away from it’s original meaning anyway, but kinda awesome?
Using fail/win as a noun, as in “full of win”. I hate it.
My wife worked for a while in the office of a casket factory. Thinking outside the box was not encouraged.
“It’s all good.” No, it’s not.
“I heard that” was fashionable for a while, meaning “I agree”. I stopped saying it when I realized I said it after I had asked for something to be repeated, due to my hearing loss. :smack:
“Raining cats and dogs” has another layer. I read the Wiki thing, but I read some other place that a much earlier mythology involved both cats and dogs as spirits of storms.
The one that really grinds on me is “Sorry 'boutcha.” It seems so vicious and heartless, that I made my wife promise to stop saying it.
I’m like, basically, like, I mean, like, you know.
or any of the above
“No-no”.
As in, “That’s a no-no.”
Drives me nuts. It sounds so condescending. I think it’s because my mom said it when I was little and doing something wrong, and it sounded condescending to me back then too.
“Push present.” Every time I hear that one I want to pop the speaker’s head off (or the writer’s, given that I’ve never heard it, just seen it in print.)
That reminds me of a similar one: “I get that”, when used to express some condescending acknowledgement of what the other person has said, just before completely disregarding it. I used to have a boss who said it in every fucking meeting. You’d explain to him why his plan violated common sense, technical reality, or federal law, and he’d say, “I get that. I do. But, we have to move forward because…” And then he’d come up with some cockamamie reason to implement the system anyway. God, I hated that guy.
Thrown under the bus.
I dislike the phrase “The country isn’t ready for _____.” Mostly, it’s uttered by someone who isn’t ready for minorities getting good jobs, women getting to vote, etc. The country is ready for whatever when enough people say it is.
Had to google that one. A gift one gives his wife after she gives birth? What a terrible phrase.
I’d never heard ‘push present’ either. Ew ew ewwwww.
I hate ‘going forward’. It never seems to mean anything at all. It’s just two extra words that don’t add anything to the sentence.
And another vote for ‘it is what it is’ (and its icky little friend, ‘we are where we are’) and ‘reach out to’. I only see that last one from Americans, for some reason. ‘I’m just reaching out to you to see if you’d be interested in working with us on this…’ That’s not reaching out to me, you eejit. That’s e-mailing me. Just call it that.
Then do midwives get “pull presents”?
To “tee [something] up” and “pushback”
I work with a woman who routinely uses corporate speak. She doesn’t prepare a document for signature. She “tees it up” for signature. She also doesn’t anticipate that the other side will reject her proposed changes to a particular document. She predicts that she’ll get “pushback”.
FML, etc., etc., etc.
Yuck, “going forward” is horrible. It’s just filling up space that could otherwise be used for lovely silence. Whenever I hear someone say that at work, I think of the Simpsons episode where the Itchy and Scratchy writers are brainstorming:
“Proactive? Paradigm? Aren’t those just words stupid people use to make themselves sound clever? … I’m fired, aren’t I?”
“Who pissed in your Cheerios?”