I didn’t find this word annoying until someone pointed it out to me, and now I find it grates on me more and more each time I hear it. I also realize that language is malleable and all that, but I’m sick of the word hopefully used to mean “I hope.” It just doesn’t mean that. I don’t even see what’s so hard about saying “I hope.” For every hundred times I hear “hopefully,” I might hear “I hope” once or twice. And I’ve given up hope that it will ever catch on.
My next complaint is not really about a word but about a trend. Trublmakr touched on it a bit but I’m going to come right out and say that something in our culture has gone crazy with superlatives. Nothing can be “good” anymore. Everything has to be “amazing,” or “awesome,” or “mind-blowing,” or any other descriptor that’s usually way over the top. The situation has become such that if you say something is “good,” you mean it’s actually pretty bad. A couple of people have mentioned how the word “so” has been thrust into all kinds of unfortunate places and this is another one where it shows up. If you want to say that you like something, you almost have to say “it’s so good.” In almost every context I’ve seen for a while, the statement that something is “good” – no qualifier – is always followed by “but here are some reasons why I don’t like it.” It’s as though “good” is the bare minimum for anything that doesn’t suck horribly.
The last complaint I have is about a phrase that comes up fairly often in online political discussions, not necessarily on this board. Many times, someone will be advancing an argument and his opponent will dismissively declare that argument to be nothing more than talking points and suspend all further consideration of it. I can’t be the only one who thinks this is annoying, right? Not only is it a dumb-sounding phrase, in my opinion, but it’s like a get-out-of-argument-free card. Somehow, if your argument is talking points, it’s even worse than being wrong. At least if you’re making a poor argument, the debator will argue against it and demonstrate that you’re wrong. But if, god forbid, you’re making an argument that by some arbitrary standard appears to be mere talking points, then begone with ye, pariah of internet politics!
“Are you sure that’s a bloodstain”.
“Actually, I’m testing right now” “Yep, it’s blood alright”.
“I thought so”.
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.
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“By the way, was that luminol you tested with”?
The ignorant use of the word ignorant as a synonym for stupid. While most mentioned on this thread certainly make me cringe, this one constantly drives me mad.
Also, oxymoron, when what you really mean is just a “contradiction.” It’s been used so much in this way, though, that it’s weasled its way into the dictionary for “contradiction.” Now, when you want to use the original poetic term correctly, no one understands what you mean.
Think outside the box. It recently occurred to me that when I do my thinking, I’m usually not in a box for it anyway, so in a literal sense, I do think outside the box. In fact, I hope I am never placed inside a box for any reason until after I am dead.
It’s been quite some time since I heard these abused last, but some college football coach couldn’t refrain from saying “offensely” and “defensely” often in his TV show.
It’s also been a while since the ubiquitous “-wise” was appended to almost any noun or verb to form a nonce word. For instance: TV-wise, healthwise, temperature-wise, speed-wise, punishment-wise.
Maybe they’re just out of fashion, but when/if I hear them I cringe.
Another one that I am hearing on a regular basis is from talk show types who on first utterance of some topic will start with “Again, blah blah blah” as an excuse not to have to say “Uh” or "Er’ or “You know” or one of the space fillers du jour.
Every hurricane season, I wait, cringing, for the next time some blow-dried moron on my TV says a system is ‘bearing down’. Just don’t say it! It sounds like a titanic bowel movement!
