Words fail 2/1/2013
To this list of ugly terms, I’ll add “partner” (as bedmate), “inappropriate”, “impact” as a verb, “differently abled”, “misogynist” in its Macquarie revisionist form and “discriminate” as a negative force; if the human race hadn’t discriminated against poisons, physically dangerous situations and murderous bastards, we’d have not lasted five minutes out of the trees.
IF exasperated word nerds ruled, “bucket lists” would be banned, “trending” topics on Twitter would be trashed, and so-called “superfoods” would simply be food.
Professor Bunyip delivers a toe crusher to those who whore their cultural responsibility for temporary – and believe me, it’s temporary – political favouritism.
English, our wonderful tongue, is forever changing, and not only when the board of the Macquarie Dictionary convenes an emergency meeting to justify the abuse of a decent man by a slattern who helped steal the funeral funds of miners’ widows and waifs.
Readers feel free to nominate terms you’d like to see purged from modern usage.
Icon/iconic, devastated, traumatised, horrific, celebrate, snapped up and strenuously deny.
Although, there is a case to give the last one a pass as its use often signals the accused is 101% guilty.
It is mainly those lacksadaisical Yankees who dilute our langauge!
“sign off on” [an agreement]. Try ‘execute’ or ‘formalise’.
“upcoming” [event]. Instead, use ‘forthcoming’, or ‘future’.
Peeps, please add “peeps” to that list. Thanks, peeps!
“Progressives”, leftist is accurate.
“Issues” used in place of “problems”
“concerns were raised” used for “we disagree”
Racist, xenophobe, catastrophic, asylum seeker (to disguise illegal immigration), misogynist, sexist, carbon (to describe carbon dioxide) and the nomination of climate-change (which in recent years has replaced globalisation) as the cause of every ill known to man.
The verb ‘architect’ when ‘design’ would perform perfectly adequately.
The verb ‘task’ which seems to have oozed out of the side of project management software; “I have tasked that”.
Standout May be used adjective or noun: carelessly indicates something which is worthy of note, as in “His role was the standout performance of the show”. Work it out for yourself. Whatever happened to the word ‘outstanding’? This is truly dumb language for infantiles.