Let me begin with a confession.
This post is of very little literary value, and required no research and no knowledge. It's just a venting of my annoyance with certain words and phrases that I think have been overused and/or misused to the point that I truly don't like hearing them in speech anymore, or reading them in the writing of others. I guess I should call them cliches, but mostly I just call them irritating.
The following is my current list of those expressions. It'll probably change by tomorrow.
1. It is what it is
2. Go for it!
3. My journey (everything in life these days is a journey)
4. If you will
5. I'm all about . . .
6. Iconic
7. Problematic
8. You've got this!
9. At the end of the day
10. No problem (when used instead of You're welcome)
11. Feeling badly
12. Stunning video
13. A sense of closure
14. Bro
15. Let's do this!
16. I could care less
17. Awesome
18. Reach out
19. To die for
20. Serious as a heart attack
21. No can do
22. Pushing the envelope
23. Giving 110%
24. Utilize
25. Irregardless
26. Amazing (as in My amazing husband, wife, etc.)
27. Towards
28. Have a good one
29. Be back in a few
30. Athleticism
31. Physicality
32. Transparency
33. Granularity
34. Impact (when used as a verb)
35. Know what I'm sayin'?
36. Come with?
37. You feel me?
38. Incentivize
39. Sounded like a freight train
40. Looked like a war zone
41. Penned (as a synonym for Wrote)
42. 24/7
43. Own it
44. True that
45. As it were
46. Take it to the next level
47. Proactive
48. In point of fact
49. At this moment in time
50. Outside the box
You might have noticed that some of the above are favorites of news anchors, and especially (for some reason) sportscasters and weatherfolks. I agree that teeth can be impacted, and colons can be impacted, and the earth can be impacted when struck by a meteorite--but how many times have you heard that rains will impact the coastline, or high temperatures might impact the I-95 Corridor? Is a word like affect not forceful enough anymore, for our action-charged news broadcasts? And have you noticed, by the way, that their "breaking news, as we come on the air" might've broken several days ago? Personally, I want to see the stunning video. Politicians are also full of phrases that aggravate me. For one thing, they keep saying the American people want this or that. Well, that's a big assumption. I'm an American person, and I often don't want what they think I want.
Words and expressions I didn't include above are the many that I used to hear a lot in my job--things like synergy and paradigm shift and value-added solutions, which are just as bad as, or worse than, the fifty in my list. By the way, on the political-correctness side of things, I'm also weary of hearing people say, "I find that offensive." It seems that almost anything we say or write is offensive to someone, somewhere. Maybe what I'm saying is, I find "I find that offensive" offensive.
Sometimes the silliest or most pretentious expressions wind up being more funny than irritating. During my IBM years I was once at a client location (it was a bank--I spent most of my workdays in banks) when their newly-installed computerized teller system developed response-time problems. When one of the programmers and I drove to a nearby branch to see exactly what was happening, the unhappy head teller pointed to her slow-as-molasses computer terminal and said, "This has left my team emotionally devastated." Strangely enough, they didn't look devastated, or even emotional, and we promptly fixed the problem, but that two-word phrase became one that we remembered, and used over and over at the bank's operations center for years afterward. I ran into one of those programmers not long ago, and when I asked him how he was doing, he grinned and replied that he was emotionally devastated. Some things stick in your memory.
What are some words and phrases that you consider to be overused, misused, frustrating, or just tiresome? Are you sick of hearing or reading those? Do any of yours match the entries in my list? (I won't find it offensive if they don't.)
A final note. Even though I've been unusually critical in this post, I do not pretend to be guiltless in the misuse of our language. I often find that I like using some expressions that I already know are wrong or ill-chosen. As a kid, I clearly remember my mom asking me why my friend Boyd, whose grandmother didn't allow dogs in her house, was crying so loud we could hear him bawling all the way down the street. "Snoopy snuck in," I explained to her, "but she drug him back out."
Hey, that still sounds correct, to me.