The "Annoying Phrase" Thread

[tonyb]

A Russian scientist and a Czech scientist had spent their whole lives studying the majestic grizzly bear. Each year they petitioned their respective governments to allow them to go to Yellowstone to study these wondrous beasts. Finally, their request was granted and they immediately flew to New York and then on west to Yellowstone. They reported to the local ranger station and were told that it was the grizzly mating season and it was much too dangerous to go out and study the animals. They pleaded that this was their only chance. Finally the ranger relented. The Russian and the Czech were given cell phones and told to report in each and every day. For several days they called in, and then nothing was heard from the two scientists. The rangers mounted a search party and found the scientists' camp completely ravaged. No sign of the missing men. They then followed the trail of a male and a female bear. They found the female and decided they must kill the animal to find out if she had eaten the scientists because they feared an international incident. They killed the female and cut open the bear's stomach... only to find the remains of the Russian. One ranger turned to the other and said, "You know what this means, don't you?" "Of course," the other ranger nodded. "The Czech is in the male."

That’s really corny. Bless you.

 

[GHT]

That’s really corny. Bless you.

It's really old too, so old that I had to leave off the suffix, "Slovakia." That estate agent's description, we have that sort of creativity as well. Our lot would have come up with something like: "A blank canvas on which to impose your mark." Other classics:
"Compact" – tiny.
"Ample storage" – a broom cupboard, big enough for exactly one broom.
"Double bedroom" – a room that is no more than one inch wider and one inch longer than the world's smallest double bed.
"In an imposing building" – in a brutalist tower block.
"An opportunity to put your own stamp on" – a disgusting wreck.
"offers ample space to maximise your lifestyle requirements". As long as you are as skinny as Victoria Beckham.

You can fairly describe a mouldy and plague-ridden hovel in a destitute area known only for its knife crime and remarkable number of boarded-up shops as "a delightfully presented apartment that is close to all local amenities in an up-and-coming area" – as long as you insert the disclaimer "in our opinion" every couple of clauses. Because the world is full of idiots with barkingly wrong opinions, right? This trick completely insulates you from any subsequent legal complaint, in our opinion.

Then they use the past tense: Call something a "two-bedroom apartment" and it seems plain, but add the "-ed" and it becomes a "two-bedroomed apartment", which sounds more upmarket and more made-to-measure. That apartment has really been thoroughly bedroomed, twice. (Grammatical precedent exists in perfectly normal constructions such as "high-walled city" or "long-legged squirrel".) Similarly, turning "open-plan" into "open-planned" emphasises the careful ratiocination of the flipper at the very moment he rammed a sofa up one end of the kitchen, in order to bedroom the place up and add £50,000 to the asking price.

Then there's the sounding formal trick. Just as the bathroom has a bath "within" and not simply "in" it, they use the more formal sounding alternative, to demonstrate their utter professionalism. Thus, "whilst" is always better than "while", and I have even encountered, with no small degree of admiration, "whereby" in place of "where", even though the words don't actually mean the same thing. But murdering the English language ain't nothing new.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Our lot would have come up with something like: "A blank canvas on which to impose your mark." Other classics:
"Compact" – tiny.
"Ample storage" – a broom cupboard, big enough for exactly one broom.
"Double bedroom" – a room that is no more than one inch wider and one inch longer than the world's smallest double bed.
"In an imposing building" – in a brutalist tower block.
"An opportunity to put your own stamp on" – a disgusting wreck.
"offers ample space to maximise your lifestyle requirements". As long as you are as skinny as Victoria Beckham.

Not forgetting the wonderful; " Ideal for the DIY enthousiast."

 

[LizzieMaine]

In New England the phrase for a house like that is "Plenny a' chahm."

 

[HudsonHawk]

I love the "up and coming neighborhood" line. It basically means the neighborhood is at rock bottom and has nowhere else to go.

But the one that gets me the most is this trend for "tiny houses". You live in a camper. Which is cool, everybody gotta be somewhere, and some of them are quite fancy. But you still live in a camper.

 

[tonyb]

I love the "up and coming neighborhood" line. It basically means the neighborhood is at rock bottom and has nowhere else to go.

But the one that gets me the most is this trend for "tiny houses". You live in a camper. Which is cool, everybody gotta be somewhere, and some of them are quite fancy. But you still live in a camper.

If I were 20 years younger I’d buy in the least “desirable” neighborhood in the region because it is getting ripe for gentrification, what with its largely intact historic commercial district and large inventory of substantial old houses awaiting maintenance long deferred. Where check-cashing joints and pawn shops are now arty little boutiques and artisanal bakeries will be in a decade or two. Much as I don’t like that yuppie stuff and suffer no illusions as to what it does to the people getting priced out, I also know the market forces are more powerful than I’ll ever be. As the cliche goes, you either get aboard that train or get run over by it.

 

[BobHufford]

But the one that gets me the most is this trend for "tiny houses". You live in a camper. Which is cool, everybody gotta be somewhere, and some of them are quite fancy. But you still live in a camper.

And a camper that would be dangerously heavy if you do try to tow it somewhere else.

 

[Benny Holiday]

In Sydney it's "renovator's dream." Which translates as POS nightmare. And there are renovation shows aplenty on the idiot box to convince Mr and Mrs Average that they could "easily" jump in and achieve said renovations themselves.

 

[tonyb]

In Sydney it's "renovator's dream." Which translates as POS nightmare. And there are renovation shows aplenty on the idiot box to convince Mr and Mrs Average that they could "easily" jump in and achieve said renovations themselves.

The real sin of a few of those shows (they *are* addictive) is in their leaving people thinking a substantial return on investment can be expected. Truth is, even people in the trades, people who really know their stuff, are taking a real risk with every flip. Sometimes things go every which way but right.

Few of the more common home remo projects — a new kitchen, say, or bathroom — actually show a positive return on investment, and that’s when they’re done right, by people with years of experience. The inexperienced homeowner who figures he’ll save all that money he’d have otherwise paid the pros will all but certainly end up with a job that reflects it.

As I’ve noted before, the house we bought four years ago was previously owned by avid DIYers. We’ve been undoing their “improvements” (with mostly hired professionals) ever since. The previous owners’ efforts amounted to a waste of materials.

 

[tonyb]

“As you can see.”

I’m flat-out busted on this one. I made an iPhone video of our short-term rental unit, to show a person who has never been in it and likely won’t be anytime soon. The place is quite well furnished and decorated, and uniquely so, if I do say so myself, so in the entirely ad-libbed video I went on at length about certain structural changes I undertook (hired out, mostly) since buying the place and the provenance of several pieces of furniture and art. Over the course of that 9 minute and 42 second video I said “as you can see” at least half a dozen times. At least.

 

[tonyb]

...

But the one that gets me the most is this trend for "tiny houses". You live in a camper. Which is cool, everybody gotta be somewhere, and some of them are quite fancy. But you still live in a camper.

I’m cool with it, too, for lots of reasons. I once had a ’47 Dodge school bus which served as a home to a friend for a year or two. It might have been a cool looking old bus, but it was still a tin can on wheels. It proved unsatisfactory for the long-term, for entirely understandable reasons. The friend moved on up to a much later model travel trailer, a somewhat more comfortable tin can, but still a tin can. He eventually joined the straight(er) world and secured himself a condominium. Advancing years will do that.

 

[Edward]

I once took part in a analytical paper that examined the difference between jargon, buzzwords, and slang within particular communities. To generalize, jargon and slang develop organically within communities and indicate one's membership of that community. The difference between the two is that jargon serves as a practical shorthand that deals with ideas, tools, techniques, and situations particular to that community. Slang on the other hand is most often used to identify something 'not of the community but with which we have to deal with'. Both slang and jargon often portray a dark humor and can be offensive to those outside the community. This in turn often adds to their bonding effect on community members. This is particularly true in communities that are involved in stressful 'life on the edge' situations, i.e. medicine, law enforcement, military, factory work, mining, logging, and commercial fishing. Slang and jargon exist because they describe something that exists to that community. Attempts to eradicate the use of a particular word or phrase usually fail because the item described continues to exist and another word or phrase will evolve to replace it. Buzzwords are a bit more complicated to define as they can be used for multiple and indistinct purposes. To generalize, buzzwords come from outside particular communities, deal with ideology and organization, and are used to imply meaning and superiority within the community. There was a lot more but that is the gist of what we determined.

One of the annoying corporate phrases that has become a plague here, leaking out into everyday speech, is "going forward". It drives me nuts hearing it. People don't say, "Next, we'll do this . . . " or "in future . . ." Instead, it's "Going forward . . . "

An awful lot of cultural-studies writing falls into that category -- academics writing solely for other academics. "Publish or perish!"

I can't help but notice that some of these phrases which apparently get up people's noses are things that I employ from time to time: "Skill set"="Set of skills;" "At the end of the day," just another way of saying, "When all is said and done." 'Low hanging fruit" is something I occasionaly say, usually to describe making fun of an easy target.

Circling back to industry jargon, I had forgotten one of my own bugbears in this arena: the word 'font.'
This is a quintessential example of a term taken out of its professional idiom and applied willy-nilly. As anyone who was in publishing or graphic design before the 1980s could tell you, the word for a specific style of letterforms used as movable type is a typeface. Times New Roman is a typeface. Helvetica is a typeface (one that should perish from the earth, but that's another rant for another thread). 'Type style' is another term, or sometimes 'Type family,' when talking about the whole range of bold, italic, etc.

A font is a somewhat antiquated printers' term that refers to the complete set of characters of a particular typeface, (and sometimes in a particular point size) from which pages of type are constructed. Going back to the days of foundry type, this would have been a case of little metal slugs with raised letters. It is the source, the 'fount' of the printed type. So, it would be fair to refer to the file on your computer that generates a specific face as a font file. But you don't choose a font when you change something from Arial into, say, Bodoni.

It's usually difficult to trace where the courruption of these terms come from, but this one can, I believe, be placed squarely on the shoulders of Steve Jobs' smelly black turtleneck. It has now become so widespread that even older professional designers have pretty much thrown up their hands and said, "Fine, it's a font."

'Open the kimono' means to disclose information about the inner-workings of a company.

Kim Kardashian, however, as a result of much backlash, plans to drop the word kimono from her new KKW Kimono Shapewear line.

“Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes.”

I consciously use that one all the time, I love its ridiculousness.

I hope to God it was a convertible Miata. Blowing thinning hair in the wind whilst blasting extreme’s “ more than words” at the full volume his aftermarket Alpine car stereo (with theft prevention, of course) could support.

The anal retentive in me is forced to point out that Extreme's More than Words didn't hit the airways until the release of the Pornograffiti album on which it first appeared - in 1990. Though Extreme never quite got beyond being eighties refugees, one thing I'll grant them is that they were mercifully free of the crass misogyny of 99% of their tiem and genre.... even Bon Jovi, who made music primarily for girls, were shocking in that regard.

But the one that gets me the most is this trend for "tiny houses". You live in a camper. Which is cool, everybody gotta be somewhere, and some of them are quite fancy. But you still live in a camper.

I adore the design and the concept of the tiny house. It's the sort of thing that could prove very welcome here in London, with so many jobs that at some point will be impossible to fill because they don't pay enough to either live in London itself, or commute in for. THey're a bit like loft-style dwellings, though: what I'd have lvoed in my early twenties, I couldn't do now. Can't imagine ever being minimalist enough for it on a permanent basis....

If I were 20 years younger I’d buy in the least “desirable” neighborhood in the region because it is getting ripe for gentrification, what with its largely intact historic commercial district and large inventory of substantial old houses awaiting maintenance long deferred.

The only way to really make money like that is to be rich enough in the first place so as you don't have to live in the cheap areas until they're pleasant enough for it...

It grinds my gears when people cry about gentrification, but what they're actually complaining about is second wave gentrification doing less to push them out than they did the original people that predate the whiner's orginial gentrification. False authenticity. On the other hand, there are those boomers who make a show of faux concern over whether their kids generation can ever afford a house, once they've sold up in London, cashed in, and are alright, Jack....

I get driven made by mislabelling of toilets (most commonly at airports, for some reason) as "male toilets" or "female toilets". Never met a toilet that had sex organs....

Anotherf thing that makes my skin crawl is the non-word "normalcy", used in placed of "normality". I know it may simply be a pavement / sidewalk thing, but..... ugh.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Warren G. Harding started that "normalcy" thing. Normalcy in his case being to carry on with your mistresses while your cronies rob the country blind until you mysteriously die. We've come so far.

 

[tonyb]

..,

The only way to really make money like that is to be rich enough in the first place so as you don't have to live in the cheap areas until they're pleasant enough for it...

It grinds my gears when people cry about gentrification, but what they're actually complaining about is second wave gentrification doing less to push them out than they did the original people that predate the whiner's orginial gentrification. False authenticity. On the other hand, there are those boomers who make a show of faux concern over whether their kids generation can ever afford a house, once they've sold up in London, cashed in, and are alright, Jack....
...

I know otherwise.

I’ve been paying my own way since a matter of weeks following my high school graduation. Back then I lived in what these days is called “close-in” districts because that’s where the cheap housing was. And it really was cheap back then. I could pay my monthly nut with as little as a day’s income, and certainly not more than a week’s. I always found such districts pleasant enough, just as I find pleasant enough the down-at-the-heel district I alluded to in the post you quoted.

I recoil at the ersatz. Among the things the seedier precincts have over the tonier parts of town is authenticity. I like that, and it pains me to see a regular old neighborhood bar get turned into someone’s idea of an Irish pub. But, as I said, these market forces are more powerful than I’ll ever be, and I won’t forego all the appreciation that comes along with that gentrification.

These days I’m a suburbanite. We live in a rambler built at the same time along the same basic plan as most of our neighbors’ houses. (You got the ramblers, in two- and three-bedroom versions, and you got the split levels, in three- and four-bedroom sizes.)

These days you’re likelier to find in the suburbs that “diversity” so many profess to treasure. Wanna be down with the people? Avoid the hipper districts. Get thee to a suburban subdivision.

 

[Edward]

The surewst way to know part of London is over is that TimeOut touts it as "the new Notting Hill".

 

[TimeWarpWife]

I'm also a suburbanite living in a "planned community" built from 1980 to 1981. By "planned community," I mean that there are different subdivisions for single family homes, townhouses, and condominiums that all share the community centers, tennis courts, basketball courts, and swimming pools (each of the five subdivisions has all these amenities, but you're allowed to use any of them as long as you live in the local community). The single family homes all have what I would call a regular sized yard, you definitely have to do yard work. However, I've noticed in the newer subdivisions being built in our county that the single family homes are built so closely together that there's barely enough room for one person standing sideways to get through the space, if you want to call it that, between the houses. They have little to no yard, in fact, our townhouses look like they have larger yards than these new McMansions. DH says it's because people want big houses, but don't want to do yard work. I don't like these new houses because unless you close your drapes, your neighbors can look directly into your house and see everything.

 

[tonyb]

I'm also a suburbanite living in a "planned community" built from 1980 to 1981. By "planned community," I mean that there are different subdivisions for single family homes, townhouses, and condominiums that all share the community centers, tennis courts, basketball courts, and swimming pools (each of the five subdivisions has all these amenities, but you're allowed to use any of them as long as you live in the local community). The single family homes all have what I would call a regular sized yard, you definitely have to do yard work. However, I've noticed in the newer subdivisions being built in our county that the single family homes are built so closely together that there's barely enough room for one person standing sideways to get through the space, if you want to call it that, between the houses. They have little to no yard, in fact, our townhouses look like they have larger yards than these new McMansions. DH says it's because people want big houses, but don't want to do yard work. I don't like these new houses because unless you close your drapes, your neighbors can look directly into your house and see everything.

There’s more than enough of that big-houses-on-postage-stamp-lots kind of development around here, too. I guess it’s a way to get housing for larger families at almost affordable prices.

I guess.

It looks awkward to me, these large, freestanding, single-family houses packed in cheek by jowl. The scale is off. But, I’ll get used to it. There’s no avoiding the sight of it.

 

[GHT]

The surest way to know part of London is over is that Time Out touts it as, "The New Notting Hill".

Notting Hill, in my younger days, was the pits, run down, semi derelict, urban decay. Much of the cleared bomb damage from WW2 remained as a dumping ground for scrap cars and domestic appliances. Slowly but surely it started to get tidied up, it's proximity to Central London made it more desirable, then Richard Curtis wrote a screenplay for a movie titled: "Notting Hill," and the must live there suburb rose like the Phoenix. There's nothing like the power of a popular film.

The Notting Hill that I still can't get my head around is Hackney. Who would ever have conceived that such a district could ever be gentrified?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Eventually those close suburban houses will get so close that they join together, and you'll have Flatbush, c. 1920.

Then thirty years later, everyone will find a big empty potato field, build a bunch of beaverboard houses, and the cycle will begin anew.

 

[Hat and Rehat]

I say "excuse me" as I shove past you because you're inconsiderately lollygagging around in a public space.
I say "I'm sorry" when I then notice your white cane.

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