I’m in IT. If you tell people to close the window, odds are 10-30% they’ll next ask you how to do that. If you tell them to X out of it, they close the window.
Here’s another one I was just reminded of today, that’s in the spirit of the OP (a word I hate, though it might seem petty, but seems to be here to stay): the word “ginger” seems to have totally supplanted “redhead.” The latter was the term when I was growing up, and the former unheard of.
I thought that was just a British thing!? I had never heard it until I visited England for the first time in 2004. I went with a friend (who was born in Birmingham but moved to the U.S. when he was four years old) to visit his grandmother. We arrived earlier than expected and she was distraught because “the rug needed a good Hooverin” and she didn’t get around to it prior to our arrival.
It’s kind of like people referring to any Soda, Cola or Soft Drink as “Coke”.
There is a word infuriates me every time I hear it because it was used incorrectly for so long that the incorrect use is now the official definition of that word!
Decimate- which meant to reduce by 10%. But you would often hear it used in comments such as “the house was totally decimated by the tornado”. Really? A tornado only destroyed 10% of the house, but it did so totally???
The official definition now is “to severely damage or destroy a large part of (something)”.
The two other words are pejorative slang that I hate. I hate all racial slurs, period. But as a gay man, there are two that I despise and offend me (and it’s very difficult to do)-
Faggot (or ‘Fag’)- a pejorative term for a gay man. I hate it because it emasculates gay men, or at least that is the way I see it and feel about it. Most gay men struggle for decades to accept themselves as being “real men” and words like this are one of the reasons.
The other term is “Dyke” referring to a lesbian. I see it as the female version of “faggot”.
Or, even more commonly, referring to any facial tissue as “Kleenex” or referring to the act of photocopying as “xeroxing.” Or referring to mobile garbage bins as “dumpsters.” Here’s a whole list of 'em.
You’ve been around here for 4 years, and you don’t know that a brigade of descriptivists is about to pour into this thread and haughtily lecture you about how there’s no such thing as “incorrect” when it comes to language?!
Wow, I knew about the alternate terms “garbage bin” or “container,” but never knew that “dumpster” was a brand name. You learn something new every day.
Man, I hate those guys. Every time I try to make myself look smart by looking up the Greek or Latin roots of a word in an etymological dictionary, they turn it around and try to make me look foolish for getting worked up about the fact that the modern English meaning of a word isn’t precisely the same as it was thousands of years ago in a different language. But we can preempt all that by warning people about their haughtiness and everything. Other any as good as is words of string random any that think they, all after.
Not only is there “hoovering” but also “luxing” in other parts of the world. So we have Hoover AND Electrolux both becoming generic terms for vacuum cleaning. I dislike both terms, but I don’t go as far as hate.
That’s embiggened of you.
Funny, I would have expected atwituensis, or summat li’ tha’…
Good point. I wonder how long it will be before everyone gets confused when they find out Ginger Rogers was a blonde…
Hey, be happy you aren’t British. There it is a verb.
And its mutant offspring dis and dissed.
And it’s a verb that’s so well established that it’s often used figuratively.
The dog hoovered up its food so quickly that it was sick afterwards.
There a similar informal British usage, to suss out, meaning to figure out. It was presumably a shortening of suspect. But it’s interesting that the meaning has broadened.
He sussed me out= he uncovered my subterfuge
This would map closely to the narrow sense of suspect - he suspected I was up to no good, but figured it out.
but also
Have you sussed out the third problem in yesterday’s maths homework?
No suspicion involved here, just straightroward figuring out.
There is also the shorter sus that predates this usage in the Sus Law. I don’t know if there’s an etymological relationship.
Interestingly it seems to have progressed from “suspect” to “investigate” too. As in:
Have you been to that new bar down Queenstown Road?
No. Shall we go there Friday night and sus it out?
Also see:
Yes. Yes I did just link to The Sun.
That’s nothing to be ashamed of in a linguistic discussion. Crass journalism to be sure, but they produce some superbly imaginative wordplay in their headlines. They are the downmarket peers of The Economist in that respect.
Up Yours Delors
(re Jacques Delors, expressing anti-EU sentiment)
The Illegals Have Landed
Elton Takes David Up The Aisle
Bin Bagged
(death of Osama Bin Laden; a bin bag is a plastic bag for a trash can in British English)
Scumbag Millionaires
(banking crisis)
GOTCHA
…upon the sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands War.
Oh, absolutely. In fact there’s even a bit of wordplay in the headline I linked to, as it regards Tino-Sven Susic.
Webinar. I was also going to say incent but was beaten to it.
“Best Practice” -
I use it myself and hate myself for it every single time. The idea behind the phrase is good. The phrase itself, though, grates (is it really the best practice or is it just a really good idea?). And the way it’s used -
[ul]
[li]“Is that a best practice?” - meaning: “I have no idea what’s going on, but I want to seem like I have something worth saying in this meeting, so I’ll throw out that phrase and other people will think I have deep, business-y thoughts.”[/li][li]“This method is a best practice.” - meaning: “I want to use this method. It’s my favorite. I don’t want to bother listening to other ideas and the magic phrase ‘best practice’ is my trump card.”[/li][/ul]
and other variants on those themes.