Not a fan of the recent trend of calling every minor problem a “hiccup”.
If you come to me complaining about a problem, I will try to think of a solution.
If you come to me complaining about a hiccup, I’m going to suggest the only known hiccup remedy, which is to do nothing and wait.
In other words, he decided to see what was on TV, and then his head literally exploded.
It’s still corporate speak today.
The only one that really sets my teeth on edge is using “ask” instead of request or demand. "The ask here is " or “I know it’s a big ask”. It always makes me scowl.
“Looping in” and “circle around/circle back” are eye rollingly dumb, but not necessarily incorrect.
I’ve found that unexpectedly leaping out of my chair, making a loud shout, and throwing my arms up as if to attack the complainer has two happy results: They stop hiccupping if they were, and, even better, they stop coming around my desk unannounced asking me to fix their stuff.
Give it a whirl and report back. 
It’s incorrect to use “utilize” for “use” because they don’t mean the same thing. You use a knife to cut materials, but it can also be utilized to turn screws.
“I can’t with X” for “I can’t deal with X”
“He can into Y” for “He succeeded doing Y”
… and some more variations, letting a proposition do a verbs job.
So I quickly inferred the meaning of these idioms when they started appearing some years ago. And actually I find them quite charming. But can someone tell me how they started? Ironically speaking ungrammatically is hilarious? Local dialect became universal? Catch phrase from a TV show? Fun expression in a foreign language was absorbed by english?
There’s an area of my brain that thoughts escape from when I’m not paying attention.
I think a lot of this stuff came from Twitter. It artificially forces people to be brief, which makes them realize that some words aren’t as necessary as we think.
For example: “I just can’t put up with that show” is basically indistinct from “I can’t with that show,” but it’s more terse.
Mostly it doesn’t bother me, but sometimes they seem a bit whimsy-poisoned or brusque. But again, that’s Twitter, either you can with it or you can’t.
Mission Statement
Alum. Alum is aluminum potassium sulfate, used in small amounts when making pickles. A person who graduated from a school is not aluminum potassium sulfate.
OK, apologists, I get that it’s a shortened version of alumnus or alumna, and it’s pronounced differently from alum when spoken. With all the phrasings talking heads use to try to sound special and educated why don’t they just finish the word? It’s only one more syllable!
“This is the most important election of our lifetime…”
“it can also be used to turn screws” seems perfectly straightforward to me. If people were very strict about only using utlilize when it was a novel/unexpected use of a thing, that might be fine, but people use it all over the place in practice.
that was fucking painful
This is a much quicker hit.
I’m smiling smugly, because at a state-wide convention, during the executive vice president’s keynote, I doodled a BuzzPhrase Bingo.
Not content with amusing the half-dozen at my banquet table, I slipped out and ran 250 copies, walked back in with them (on a clipboard, important for legitimacy), and passed out a stack for each table (asking “would you mind passing these around”).
Center square was indeed SYNERGY.
Epilog: I watched as people chuckled, checked off boxes, then pointed me out when The Meeting Maven decided to track down the culprit.
I shrugged, “I’m sorry, but I distinctly heard the VP say we needed to be ‘maximumly engaged’. BuzzPhrase Bingo is maximum engagement, and I just took the initiative because apparently no one else here does that.”
Turns out there was a VP at my table, and the next day I got an email asking me to help her with a big outreach project.
A good liar could steal half the gold in Ft. Knox armed with just a clipboard! Works every time.
Apparently advertising works. And at least one VP at your company isn’t a stuck-up turd. Congrats! I hope!
I am surprised nobody has mentioned the use of “impact” to mean either affect or effect. It gets to me mostly on newscasts, but anywhere it’s used grinds my gears on the edge of a knife. Yeah, I understand that if you don’t know what you’re doing and you try to use effect, you will probably get it wrong. But, journalists are wordsmiths. They get paid for that shit. They are supposed to be the ones who know which one to use and could use the opportunity to teach by example. It’s really not that hard, you just have to think about what you are trying to say.
I’d like to think my rants would affect people’s behavior, but it’s likely to have no effect whatsoever.
Or,
I’d like to think my rants would impact people’s behavior, but it’s likely to have no impact whatsoever.
(Impact my head)
Doesn’t bingo lose some of its inherent playability if everyone has a copy of the same card?
I hate when people (usually politicians) use the word “folks”, or even worse, “folk”, instead of “people” to give it a more common, “folksier” tone when they’re describing something. Like a politician saying “I’ve been hearing from folks that…”. To me, it just sounds manipulative and stilted, like they’re trying to be one with the commoners. I could barely tolerate it when Obama would use it (often), but I’ll give him a pass. No one else has any excuse.
Or get a scoop when working for :