Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Words I Hate

Signage. What is wrong with "signs," I ask you?

Utilize. Used when "use" is just not fancy enough.

Deployment. Among academic writers, routinely utilized as a synonym for "employment." I am not joking.

Gazillion. As in "If you publish my book, we'll sell gazillions of copies."

Prior to. Theodore Bernstein, author of The Careful Writer, asks: "Would you say posterior to in place of after?

And now that I have revealed myself as a spleeny crank, I feel much better and am off to feed the goats.

5 comments:

Kate Meo said...

I add "impact" as a verb in any sense other than the dental/colonic, as in "the molar/colon is fully impacted."

Deployment? As in, "I had a fellowship there but now I'm deployed at Harvard"? Really?

Yesterday I was reading about "positive anymore" and that's just wacky. http://positiveanymore.blogspot.com/2005/11/positive-anymore-what-heck-does-that.html
defined at http://everything2.com/title/positive+anymore+speech

Dawn Potter said...

A friend has reminded me of the dreadful "offload" instead of "unload."

And yes: "deployed at Harvard." That is exactly what's going on.

charlotte gordon said...

I like spleen. It cheers me up to know you are out there disliking things. Also, I too am suspicious of YA as a subdivision/suburb of novels.

Ruth said...

I would add " prioritize" instead of "place in order of importance" and the phrase "to build community"!!!! Some communities cannot, should not be built and some build themselves.
Oh I do agree about offload. Do we have onload? Oh glory, see what you have unleashed!!

Dawn Potter said...

You should see the 26 comments under my Facebook complaint about "signage." There's a world of spleeny word haters out there!