Ghastly expressions you want to see the back of in 2011

Scran

 

Yup that, but I'm more worried about how "nosh" has changed over the years. One has to be soooo careful these days!

 

Indeed, people could easily misinterpret the most mundane comments…

Hate the word ‘scran’ though. Awful!

 

Hang on! Doesn't "Nosh" mean food/eat? East end para-Yiddish?

 

Not sure I'd suggest googling!

 

'ard workin' families

OK, so what if you work hard, but live on your own?

Or you have a family, but you're retired?

 

I dare not!

 

it’s simply another term for ‘bj’

 

Very commonly used in and around North Yorkshire when I moved there in 82.

Cheers BB

 

Ah! Fellatio!

 

I get pee'd off with all the unnecessary adjectives used by media and political types these days.

'Hard working families' - no they are not. They are just families - or perhaps not a family at all.

'Dedicated teachers/nurses' No they are not - they are teachers or nurses, simple. Is the interviewer/commentator/politico implying only to respect all those teachers or nurses that are somehow 'dedicated'? It is utterly pointless use of language.

And another thing - the increasing use of phrases like '2x less weight than xxx' in advertising blurb Just screamingly painful, dumb, wrong language. Go back to school Mr Copyrighter. It might be 'half of the weight of xxx', it cannot be and is not 2x less weight.

 

Those copywriters know exactly what they’re doing, and “2x" is far better sounding than “half”, because “2x” is more, and more is always good. This is of course the profession that hides its lies with sentence fragments and misleading wording. One I remember, from Apple, of course, was “Every day, more photos are taken on iPhone”. No, there was no “than” except the one they wanted you to imagine. Really, It just said that people take photos. Replace with “box Brownie” and it’s equally true. An unsupportable claim is illegal, but something that sounds almost like the same unsupportable claim? That’s advertising!

But the one unnecessary insertion that really bugs me is politicians and other spokesbeings who use the formulation “...who, sadly, died” . As there’s no occasion to ever say “who, happily, died” in public, then the word “sadly” is redundant here. Death isn’t sad - it’s heart-breaking. Grief deserves respect, and their insulting platitudes diminish that into a phony soundbite. The only thing worse is when the speaker bulldozes through the commas before and after “sadly” (it is a sub-clause), leaving us with: “he sadly died”. Was he really sad? Was he more likely surprised? Did someone in theatre wake him from anaesthesia to ask how he felt just before he popped off? Stop it. Stop it now!

 

The phrase I hate most is ‘there will be lessons learned’. No there won’t because it is most often used by organisations who repeat the same mistakes from years ago and years before that

Call me old fashioned but young people putting ‘super’ before everything. Example ‘super happy’

Then on the plethora of cooking programmes nothing seems less than ‘taking to another level’ . And if I hear many more references to Umami I’ll scream

Good - I’ve got that off my chest…..!

 

This might be a personal gripe not shared my many others and does not qualify as "ghastly", but nevertheless:

Media nowadays tends to say "interest rates have moved by half of a percentage point from 4.5 percent to 5 percent" whereas my I would say "interest rates have moved 0.5 percent .....". I was taught maths at school which included the use of the decimal system and know there is no need for talk of percentage points when stating such data. In media speak they I suppose they assume the listener does not know what a fraction of a percent is and so talk about percentage points, but in the same sentence revert back to straight forward "percent" without the "point" when coming to the actual rate of interest.

 

When did "issue" become synonymous with "problem" or vice versa? The problem (issue) is that one can no longer use "issue" to describe something that can be either positive, negative or neutral, since in current English it seems to have only a negative connotation.

 

Boris Johnson?

 

"... in lockstep"
*unt has just used it again.

"Inflation is a stealth tax that is the biggest threat to living standards in a generation, so we support the Bank’s action today so we succeed in halving inflation this year.

“We will play our part by making sure government decisions are in lockstep with the Bank’s approach, including by resisting the urge right now to fund additional spending or tax cuts through borrowing, which will only add fuel to the inflation fire and prolong the pain for everyone.”"

 

i'm in lockstep

 

No.10 can't even manage to be in lockstep with itself, let alone with the BoE.

 

Tyre garages with fully fitted prices! Is half fitted cheaper?