“Center around” bugs the fucking hell out of me. It makes no sense. It’s “center on” or “revolve around.”
Get out of here with your “based out of.” It’s “based in” or “works out of.”
“Woke” Originally it meant “Yeah, I understand the feelings and needs of others”. Now it has been co-opted by the right wing to mean “I’m a new MAGAbot and I’m gonna post all the conspiracy theories I can find and share every post that smears a Democrat!”
I really don’t like that either.
But a bit like “That [whatever] needs fixed”, through various threads we’ve found that it’s a “legit” or at least long-standing regionalism in some parts of the USA.
Would that it were not so.
The recent NBA draft meant reading/hearing a lot of another new term that annoys me - a prospect has “handle,” meaning that they are skilled at ball handling.
I get the need for shorthand but this recent coinage and use of a verb as a noun really grates.
Going back to the turn of the last century, sportswriting has always been a prolific source of inventive slang, creative misuse of otherwise cromulent words, and verbifying nouns, nounifying adjectives, etc. with wild abandon.
Well, I saw a euro-footie headline on Deutsche Wille that began “Dortmund through …" but it meant the opposite of my initial take. “Through” is a funny word that way.
Except “handle” already is a noun and they’re just giving it an additional meaning.
I’ve seen US posters on this board refer to a “handle” of booze. I’ve got no idea what that means. It’s a noun usage that I’m unfamiliar with. But, seems to be an accepted usage.
Why not a new usage for the noun ”handle” to mean a particular skill? Sounds to me like the phrase “she’s got game”, where “game” is a noun meaning abilities and drive.
I know way too many people who are unable to utter a sentence that does not begin with the word “so”.
mmm
Usually a “handle” is one of the 1.75 liter bottles that has a handle already built in- like this, although most online pictures have the bottle turned so that the handle isn’t so prominent.
https://vintageliquor.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/1.75ML-white-background.jpg
My Mother-in-law starts and ends every sentence (almost) with “so…”
Actually, any such use of “woke” is a great example of a term that aggravates the hell out of me. In my lexicon, “woke” is the past tense of the verb “wake”, nothing more. It’s bad enough to ascribe some psycho-sociological meaning to it in reference to awareness of social injustice, but it’s a particularly clumsy form of the verb to try to turn into a new adjective. The past participle “woken” would be slightly less jarring, or “awake” which is already an adjective and could be considered a metaphor in this context. “Woke” used in this way has all the elements of an illiterate attempt at grandiloquence – a really bad and arguably unnecessary colloquialism.
The origin is in a dialect with a different grammar than the one you’re accustomed to.
To forestall a possibly long and boring hijack, I’ll just say that my point was that I greatly dislike the word. You are free to disagree.
But I will also add that its origins in AAVE are hardly any kind of defense to its general appropriation in everything from urban slang to advertising. In that context it’s nothing but cultural appropriation in an attempt to be “cool”, as in one New Yorker writer’s reference to a plant-based junk food as a “woke McRib”. While awareness of social injustice, especially racism, remains its primary colloquial meaning, note this comment from an article about its widespread use: “a concurrent definition signals a shift in meaning to ‘the act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue’.” This is the sense in which I frequently tend to read it in its appropriated context.
Was you mother-in-law Mrs. Doyle from Father Ted? Because she seemed to end most of her utterances with “so”.
After insisting that everyone must have tea! Bless you, my son – you may be the only person I’ve found here on the left side of the Atlantic who appreciates Father Ted! 
So why does it bother you so?
…
Well, at least I don’t end every post saying “mmmmmm…” (without adding “…bacon!”)
There’s sort of a sub-category of phrases or terms that aggravate the hell out of people (at least me) that is made up of perfectly good words that all of a sudden become fashionable, and end up being so overused (especially in writing) that they become meaningless and are just lazy writing.
“Parse” was one such word. Came into fashion a few years ago. Before that, I hadn’t heard it since the nuns were teaching me grammar back in elementary school (and I’m old).
Right now, it’s “iconic.”
The kids on Schitt’s Creek do the sentence-ending “so” a lot too.
uh oh, I better not reply to any of your posts then 
back on topic, I find “it is what it is” to be very irritating and try to keep my eyes from rolling back into my head whenever I hear it.
//i\\
This has been used for years by my family to mean “Not gonna do nothin’ 'bout it.” Maddening.