What are some of your linguistic grouses?
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Tantalisingly cliched...
...There are certain phrases that catch on in journalism and then are used to death so that they lose all meaning and novelty. One of my (un)favorites is "tantalisingly out of reach". Recently, an article in Economist said: "China remains tantalisingly out of Facebook's reach." Well no. It remains determinedly so, blockheadedly so, but not tantalisingly so.
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Opening a can of worms, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteI absolutely despise the comma-well-comma, which is terribly overused in American feature writing. You can find it at least once a day in any big-city newspaper:
ReplyDelete- "We call them the liberal arts because they are, well, liberal."
- "Amateur video shows a man being wheeled out of the Heart Attack Grill after a medical episode that restaurant employees say looked like, well, a heart attack."
It's a lame affectation used to denote false hesitance or draw attention to some clangingly obvious irony, but it doesn't even mimic the way most people actually, well, speak. But most of all, it's just, well, overused.