Words/phrases that should be banned from use

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This is a spin-off of a Fark thread at http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comment ... nk=1834737 - I thought it would be fun here since many of us hate trendy buzzwords and incorrect use of language. Here are some of mine:

"All-natural" food and "Herbal" medicine. - Unless it contains manmade elements, all food is all-natural. So-called "artificial" flavorings and preservatives are made from naturally-occurring compounds, just as bread is made from wheat. And cocaine, cyanide, nicotine, and countless other dangerous chemicals are naturally occuring, so it's not as if natural stuff is inherently good for you. If you claim that processing something makes it artificial, then you can't call *anything* "all natural" unless it's something like raw fruit, vegetables, etc.

"Blogosphere" - "blog" is bad enough without extending it into even dorkier words.

"Only 6 carbs!" - "Carb" is not a unit of measurement. Saying that is every bit as stupid as saying you put 10 gasolines in your tank, or your TV runs on 120 electricities.

"English 101 is a prerequisite for this course." - Translates to "English 101 is a necessary requirement before a necessary requirement for this course." "Pre" is inferred by the definition of the term, and therefore makes no sense.

"Solution" when used to describe a product/service, or especially when turned into a verb like "solutioneering". It's overused to the point of no longer having any meaning. A unique product that solves a unique, complicated problem could rightly be called a solution. But calling something like Linux+Apache+MySQL a "Web solution" is like calling your car a "transportation solution". In other words, pretentious and stupid.

"Pre-owned", "Pre-driven", etc. - It's "used". If you're going to give me a load of euphemistic BS before I even visit your dealership, why on earth would I want to buy a car from you?

"We'll pay off your old loan for you!" - See above. It really means "We'll roll your old loan into your new one, give you practically nothing for your trade-in because of our 'favor', and you'll be paying for a car you no longer own for the next 5 years!"

..Let's hear some more!

How about, "Better than the Leading Brand!"

Perfect example! If that's really true, then why aren't they the leading brand? And why don't they say who it is?

There is "with real chicken".
This gets to me. What is pretend chicken like?

I say ban all politically correct euphamisms!

Words drift.
It would be nice (new sense) if they were set in stone, but they're not.
Even a dictionary doesn't quite hold them still.

An English monarch, it is said, once described St. Pauls Cathedral as
"Awful, pompous and artificial"
All three words being compliments at the time.

But the rate of mangling terms nowadays is something spectacular.
We've gone from a placid river to a white-water rapid.

And if enough people use a word badly, that becomes its real contemporary meaning.

Particular regrets for meanings lost or misunderstood:

Ultimate. "The ultimate beach holiday"
Are they going to destroy all beaches, ban holidays, or just kill you after you take it?

Senile. A perfectly good word, of principally medical use, but now effectively dead.
Senile macular degeneration (SMD) has now been renamed Age-related maculopathy (ARM)

In "senile dementia", the senile element does not mean "dementia" The DEMENTIA element means dementia!

Except that now it does.

Never mind. What's your PIN number?

But I have a peculiar (old sense) taste for using words with precision which tends to appear peculiar (new sense) to others.

Ask the Colonel.

Leet, l33t, 1337, w00t, rofl, roflmao, roflmfao, lmao, lmfao, lol, lolitude, lolz, lols, lolzors, lolz0r5, gd, tnx, B, B4, C, 4, gr8, inn8, masturb8, anythingwith8, gj, gg, festival tree, love (just so pop band losers have to find new material), gurnz, beetches, broooooads, hoez, pimpdadday, mack, mackdadday, macking, orn, dem, bizatches, floccinauccinihilipilification (real word), bangin, wikkid, selecta, brrrrap, blud, buff, ting, bwedewin, bredrin, bare, bruh, roasting, happy slap, wagwan, gwaaned 'im, safe (when the next word is blud, bruh, or prefixed by 'that is bare').

Oh, and chode.

"In a scientific study" - tells me absolutely nothing about the study

"A leading expert" - who's credentials are unknown

"Only 4 easy payments" - to mask the fact that the POS I'm going to buy cost $119.95

"Satisfaction garunteed" - and if I'm not it's gonna cost me just as much to get my unconditional refund

"Intellectual Property Rights" - Don't get smart with me and just use the word "copyright"

"Antiestablishmentarianism" & "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" - Too many damn letters!

Hang on, I might need on of those.
I am a disestablishmentarianist and were I to change my mind...

It was at the Mexico olympics where one of the competing sailing boats carried the name Sup... and had to shorten it to Superdocious, allegedly at the request of the commentators.

Sorry, this sort of stuff sticks in my brain.

That's because people never look at dictionaries. As a philosophy tutor, it is mindboggling how students will assume they knew what more commonly used words actually mean, like "opinion," "logic" and "think." Words like "essentially" and "absolute" were likewise badly abused. Actually, the list is quite long, and very distressing. One of the professors at my alma mater used to tell the class to get a dictionary and look up words, and the students would actually get defensive!

(Having said that, I think the word "mindboggling" probably ought to be banned, because it's annoying. I should have used "confounding" or "bewildering.")

This isn't a new complaint. At least both C.S. Lewis and George Orwell criticized this phenomenon, but it doesn't seem to have a remedy. Language itself is a living and therefore highly mutable and easily influenced system. In a sense, it needs to change to adapt to the communication needs of a community. Likewise it comes to reflect that community's unique historical experience. Hence why Latin is heavy with words relating to army, law, and war, ancient Greek argiculture, culture and commerce, and ancient Hebrew God, family/tribe and religion. Their modern counterparts lacks these same emphases, because these cultures have changed historically. In many cases, words that once served one of these historical emphases have adopting new meanings and connotations.

Lewis and Orwell both lived in a time where they saw wide spread propaganda to promote violent and oppressive ideologies. They saw the abuse of words as a deliberate attempt to confuse and manipulate minds. Unfortuantely, you can do this with langauge. The problem now in our post-WWII world is we're paranoid about langauge and we distrust it. We suspect changes in a word as something forced or contrived, having an adverse intent behind it. Yet strangely enough, despite our mistrust and paranoia, we're still psychologically vulnerable to language. This why the worst abuse of language today - advertising - is so highly affective. We scoff at advertising, because we feel that our suspicion makes us immune, but studies prove that advertising is as effective on our thoughts as ever. Why? Because most of us have been so inundated by advertising since our earliest childhood, we've been conditioned on a subconscious level to mentally yield to it. There's also indications that this early conditioning to advertising impedes the later development of higher critical thinking skills. Scary, huh?

Even using dictionaries won't hold the line completely, because of your second point. A book can't catch the nuances as words are used in different groups with under- or over- statement, even acquiring inverted meanings as irony effects a polarity change.

Are we paranoid about language? WE* may be. I suspect the great majority use language the way fish use water, without real conscious awareness.
Who spots the fnords these days, with exception of the polarised groups alert to the tricks in the other side's propaganda (but not their own)?

In the new Dr Who series, there was a story which involved a news satellite which had been taken over at the top level, and only suitably adjusted or filtered news was being allowed to the planet below. One bright spark commenting on this in the newsgroups put "What a bold and original plot!" It hadn't occured to him that manipulation might occur, never mind that it is inevitable.
"1984", "Scoop" and others in fiction go for nothing, never mind the myriad of real life examples.

I have come across a worse example, but I wouldn't expect anyone to believe it.



*"we" here being the linguistically aware, and possibly thereby a higher proportion in the AS community than elsewhere. That's up for debate.

I have a few:

African-American = when i first heard this term (and even now tend to think that way), i thought of someone with somekind of continental Dual citizinship. I see it as you are either african or american, unless you are born of american citizens in africa, what if a white couple bear a child while on military duty in, say, Nambia? wont that child be...African-american even though its white? Besides its presumptioius, even if its meant regarding ancestry, not all blacks come from africa and technically all humans are black, as they traced the mitachondrial DNA back to africa. Its as dumb to say im European-Native American. If saying white is not bad, why is saying black? Frankly this term is so stupid, i refuse to ever use it.

Caucasian = well, im not from the Caucaus mountains in Southern Russia? So why on earth am i called as such? I think i will start putting other and write in European-Native American, just to contend with the other stupid labeling and out of spite.

Plausible Deniability = another stupid term, and duh, it comes from who else, politicians when they can claim no knowledge of something they did not directly order or see, but did do so indirectly.

Economic Feasibility = cant they just say affordable?

"i'll look into that" = one of the many common gibberish phrases that politicians use to essentially say nothing, but sound like they are saying something.

Catch-22 = not that this phrase itself is bad, its just that bad that crap like this exists. Something that is unacheivable because the step to get to the goal can not be achieved without getting to the goal.

have your people get with my people = i say huh?? another attempt to avoid responsibilty for one's actions?

Temporary Insanity = im not sure if this even exists, but should it not at least have some viable solid standards to prove if it did occur or did not occur. Opened ended non defined reasoning is bad, especially in a court room, it leaves TOO MUCH ROOM for ERROR.

i would like to add as a joke, but with meaning, "Monkey see, monkey do" as a rebuttle to so called tv and media violence supposedly causing people to become violent. If that were so, then people that read the bible, the Koran, or the New Testament, would have become nut ball sadists long ago such that the humans would have killed themselves off manytimes over.

I will add more later, i know lots of stupid words i see all the time.

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http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/01/22/king.controversy.ap/

Racial theory (dont know the proper term) says that at one point in pre-history there existed 4 distinct races of homo sapiens; caucasoid, negroid, mongoloid & australoid

'its political correctness gone mad'

On another board i frequent, this is an established variant on Godwin's law.