I’m getting tired of “ironically” being used to describe trivial coincidences:
Matt Affleck was considered for the role of Dusty Nosepicker in the movie Orange Trucks Away!, which instead went to Ben Damon. Years later, when producers of My Girlfriend the Frog were casting the lead character of Nosy Dustpicker, they ironically rejected Damon and hired Affleck.
Wikipedia contributors do this a lot. Everything is “ironic” instead of, y’know, just two actors auditioning for the same roles, you stupid fuck!
Daniel Keyes made this observation about “exceptional” in his short story Flowers For Algernon (published as a short story in 1959, extended to a novel in 1966 when this particular passage was probably added). The narrator, musing about labels, comments that having gone from retarded to superintelligent means he’s been exceptional all his life.
I bet Keyes had been annoyed by that for some time.
It was after reading my third Koontz’s book that I started playing “spot the ‘sodium vapor lamp’”. I don’t recall which one, but there was only one of his books that didn’t contain that phrase.
Fanfiction is quite guilty of this. For some reason everybody uses the same synonyms, especially when it comes to color. (Stop using the word “cerulean” when “sky blue” works just as well and it doesn’t make you sound like a pretentious git! :mad: )
There was one Neon Genesis Evangelion story which always described Rei’s eyes as “alazarin”. Annoyed me to no end. I guess they were trying to avoid the other overused term (crimson), but every time I saw the term pop up it pulled me right out of the story because I kept thinking of paint.
I thought of “ironic” on the way home from breakfast. One of the worse in general use. Alanis Morissette got it right with maybe half the uses in her song. Probably less often, but I’m too lazy to go count them.
I’m been reading A Song of Ice And Fire (no potential spoilers in response to this post please) and while I’m loving the series, something I’m really sick of is “boiled leather”. Yeah, I get it, R.R. Everyone’s wearing boiled leather. At this point, somebody described as wearing boiled leather is for me like reading “she had long blond hair with a green barrette in it, and a face”.
You’ve been reading “Brokeback Mountain” fanfic, with Jack and his cerulean eyes, haven’t you?
Even worse than their synonyms for colours are their synonyms for body parts and sex acts. Here’s a tip; if you don’t write about them doin’ it every other paragraph, you don’t have to come up with quite as many synonyms. And now I’m tired of typing the word “synonym.”
I don’t know if you can validly complain about sports schticks like “three-peat” - using tired, hackneyed old clichés is, like, their bread-and-butter, nomesane? (Ooh, that’s a good one - “like!”)
Two that are far too entrenched to even bother getting riled up about anymore (but which I still hate) are “24-7”, and “Taking it to the next level”.
But what really makes me want to start setting fires is the mindless use of the word “surreal” to describe any unexpected or “neat” event. I hear this most often from movie stars who have just met or worked with an older movie star that they admire. “Working with Hoffman was just so surreal”. No it wasn’t. Unless, during your tenure with Dustin, he pulled seventeen, elk-shaped bars of soap from his mouth while singing Ukrainian butter-churning songs, riding bare-back on a flaming bicycle, and furiously masturbating with a stoat, it most decidedly was not surreal.
This really irritates me. I hear it all the time in conversation, with intelligent people who should know better. It’s used casually, as a preface to statement of opinion or fact, and maybe I overreact, but the word indicates that the speaker’s opinion is the true reality. It’s a pompous substitute for “In my opinion (admittedly stilted sounding)” or a simple “I think…” Bleah.
"Up close and personal". Seems every time there’s a description of some (usually televised) interview, it’s described as the interviewer getting “up close and personal” with the interviewee. Laziness! Use something different!
