I am really getting tired of seeing replies of ‘this’, ‘that’ and ‘+1’. It isn’t really enough for the pit, and if the poster further expounds, it isn’t too bad, but just to quote a post and reply ‘this’, isn’t very meaningful to me.
And besides, you kids get off my lawn.
Bob
“I was all”. As in, “He asked me to the prom, and I was all, ‘Woo hoo!’” When phrases like this start to show up in commercials for large telcos is when it crosses the annoying boundary for me because it’s no longer just an eccentricity of my teenage daughter.
This isn’t about people not liking some new form of speech you youngsters have come up with. It’s about those new forms of speech getting old and overused. Equal opportunity griping, open to all ages.
OK, I acknowledge that it has a particular meaning for foodies. (Uh oh. :D) I’ll just use a different reason when I mentally slap Christopher Kimball from now on.
I thought people had forgotten about “teachable moment” but I heard it again this morning. Arrrrgh.
I’m much more of a fan of “we are who we are” (actually “We R Who We R”), because that’s a Ke$ha song.
My most hated right now is “ginormous” (or however you’re supposed to spell it). It’s just an abomination.
I mean, the words “gigantic” and “enormous” are already pretty darned close to interchangable. Looking at dictionary.com, it seems like the point of departure is that “enormous” can be used to describe extent, while gigantic is pretty much restricted to describing size.
So what the hell do we need a combination for? What does “ginormous” add to the language? What hole or need does it fill that the other two words don’t already?
The only answer is in the OP, i.e. it’s trendy. If you say “ginormous”, you show that you’re hip and with it. The word serves no other purpose.
I’ll go along with most of what’s been said (“baby daddy” sounds like it came from the deep intellectual bastion of journalism, People magazine, “it is what it is” is lazy thinking, and “ginormous” sounds like something a five year old would say: “I have a ginormous bunch of eleventy-gazillion blocks!”).
Damn, now I forgot what I was going to add, so I’ll add the enormous number of punctuation marks!!! Like on Facebook posts, some moron will post “I don’t want to go to work this morning!!!” and his/her friend will post, “I know, right???”
I’ve posted about this before, but it annoys me to see a dollar sign and the word dollars after it: $100 dollars. I’ve even seen it in a USA Today article (not that they’re really any higher journalistically speaking than People, but I do think more of a newspaper than a celeb-watching magazine).
While I agree that some of these are annoying, as several other posters have said, none of them are “trendy”. A few are really old, such as “awesome”. That one’s been around since I was a kid in the 60s.
And a few are positively ancient, such as “easy-peasy” and “cutie patootie”. Hardly baby talk, they’re old style (1920s-ish) “trendy” sayings, akin to 23 Skidoo and “the bees knees”. Personally, I like them both just for that reason. I love stuff that’s from that era.
And I’m sorry, I’m going to anti-rant for “I know, right”? Such a useful saying. A good for instance, the light rail had issues a week or two ago, and we had to take a bus up to a different station to get the rest of the way into town. I’d been riding near some tourists with whom I’d been chatting before the train stopped.
As we (finally, after a good half an hour wait) got on the bus, this guy just PUSHED his way past everyone already on the steps of the bus, all of us pushed aside made I contact and this old grandpa-ish guy says “I know, right”? It was completely of the moment, every single person was instantly connected by the same thought, and one tiny (and very quick) little phrase, just said it all. And the old white dude saying it was cute and funny.
A lot lighter, more fun, and time-saving than standing on the steps of the bus discussing “well, that fellow was rather clueless wasn’t he”. “Why, yes, we believe he was, and rude too”.
I get that over-use of popular sayings can be annoying, but they’re popular and well-used for a reason, they have a place, and they can make sense.