“Let’s rock and roll” makes me want to take a hard swing at someone (usually the person who uttered the phrase).
Pronouncing “with” as “wiff”. There are several pop songs out there in which their singers (and I use that term loosely) are apparently unable to correctly pronounce the “th” part of any word, but the word “with” in particular.
Pet peeve of mine, mostly because I realized I started to say it. Here’s what I do now:
Person: “It is what it is.”
Me: “It is what it is? You mean: this sucks, but there’s nothing we can do about it?”
Most people agree with me. IMHO, it’s sooooo much better just to call out stuff that is unfair/annoying/objectionable then to mindlessly regurgitate stock phrases that you picked up from some fucking television show and that don’t mean a goddamn thing but are really just vacuous nonsensical strings of words that don’t really mean what they purport to mean and are contributing to the rapid demise of our society and culture AND linguistic purity and that…
Whoops! Sorry. I told you that phrase irritated me! It made me write a maniacal run-on sentence!!!
It sounds like a spin on an old Scottish proverb: If wishes were horses, beggars would ride
If turnips were swords, I would wear it by my side.
And ifs and ands were pots and pans
There would be no work for tinkers.
My grandma used to respond to unreasonable childhood demands with: “If wishes were horses!”, in her heavy Scotch accent, when I was little as an abbreviated form of the first line “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
I always understood it to mean: “Well, you can’t always get what you want.” Or “Too bad life isn’t so easy that you got everything you wished for.” Or more accurate to grandma’s tone of voice: “Sucks to be you.”
I don’t think the pigs version works as well because it suggests the pigs would want to fly.
There’s a whole lot of this stuff too, beloved of the liberal left. I “self identify as” when the person means simply “I am”. "I self-identify as an “AboriginalorTorresStraitIslanderPerson” when they mean, “I’m an Aborigine.” As long as it sounds more “awesome and in tune with the woods”, folks’ll use it.
In line with the person I quoted, it even goes beyond politics to just “general wank because it sounds better”; for hundered of years it’s been fine to “give” something to someone. Now, however, you have to “GIFT” it.
HATE: Every year, before leaving work on December 31, I have to hear at least 4 mouth-breathers utter, “See ya next year! Hyuh, hyuh, hyuh!”
Yeah, not if I kill you before you leave, asswipe!
My dad had several signature phrases, one of which was “I’m sweating like a whore in church” or the alternative, “Nervous as a whore in church”.
Other dad-isms:
“I’m busier than a cat covering shit”
“You can’t boil water for a tramp”
“Anyone who’d eat that, would shit in church”
“You can’t remember twice around a broomstick”
I still say some of these. Well, the less insulting ones, anyway.
Count me in on the “at the end of the day” dislike – it seems like some people I know can’t go three sentences without saying it.
The word “journey,” as used in “This is the story of one man’s personal journey to find the peace within others … and himself,” is really getting on my nerves.
I’ve been using it in a mocking manner, trying to get people to stop (“I took a personal journey to the deli for lunch today”), but so far, to no avail.
I’m with you on that one. A guy at the office where I used to temp would say this constantly. I forgot where I read/heard this, but the ideal solution is to grab the offender by the throat, tightly, and ask “Breathin’ hard, or hardly breathin’?”
I’m tired of “pushing the envelope.”
For some reason, I’m enamored of “The hell?” used instead of “What the hell?”
“Sorry 'bout cha.” I don’t even remember why, but I can’t stand that one. It sounds vicious and bitchy. I’d feel the same about “Sucks to be you,” but nobody’s ever said it to me.
All those “sweatin’ like” and “hotter than” phrases are so tired. I now just say, “I’m sweatin’ like a…sweaty thing.”
“There’s no I in team.”
“That’s true, coach, and there’s no U in winner.”
I’m nobody’s Granny, so I say, “If beggars were choosers, then horses could ride.”
YES. Oh God, thank you. I really can’t think of a word I hate more. There’s no point to it! Either you’re guessing, or you’re estimating. I am unable to come up with a circumstance in which this word is useful. Even worse, people I know who say “guesstimate” seem to think that they should use it multiple times in the same conversation, and always with a self-indulgent “Tee hee! Look at my clever word!” sort of tone.
I had a biology lab instructor who insisted that we “guesstimate” the number of E. coli colonies on a petri dish, and that after we had come up with a “guesstimate,” we were to write down the “guesstimate” in our reports. You could hear the finger quotes in her voice. If there were only a couple of colonies, we could count them, but in most cases, a “guesstimate” would be sufficient…
At which point I was ready to yell, “Guesstimate THIS!” The “THIS” would be something violent and possibly felonious. That’s the kind of berserker rage it inspires.