Reds Rant on Irritating words

 RHYS BOWEN:  Who watched the coronation of King Charles? I didn’t wake up in time for some of it, but I caught up later, and was really impressed. I love that whole pomp and circumstance feeling of traditions that are centuries old and still meaningful. I loved watching the crowds surging toward Buckingham Palace and seeing the king and queen consort come out onto the balcony. (I have to confess I have a hard time thinking of her as queen!) He had a rather bemused expression on his face, didn’t he? As if he couldn’t believe he was finally not only accepted by the public but loved.

Anyway, the one irritating thing about the coronation was reporters using the word “CORONATED.”   That ‘s a made up word. The word is crowned. He was crowned king. 

It drives me bonkers when people make a verb from a noun or use an excessively complicated word or saying for something that is simple. But it seems that we love to over-complicate language, presumably in the hope of sounding more educated.  I remember Richard Nixon always saying “At this moment in time” when he meant NOW.

Same goes for “each and every” when you mean just every or all.

I shudder when newscasters say “Twenty four seven” meaning presumably all day long.

The Victorians were great at long, complicated words. Being more educated than us they knew latin. So the word for a little baby carriage on wheels was a PERAMBULATOR, meaning for the purpose of walking your child. (We have shortened it to a pram.)

The word for a carriage that could transport many people was an OMNIBUS (meaning, in Latin, for all). We call it a bus.

I could go on and on. “Parasol… to keep out sun. Umbrella… to provide shade.  Telephone.. This one Greek, of course…far away sounds.

It seems ironic that at the same time as we are saying coronated the language is being whittled down by social media. Our teenagers can convey a sentence in a series of acronyms. BFF. LOL  That’s about the extent of my vocabulary and my only emoji is a heart to my grandkids

The art of letter writing has been lost. We text in language pared down to the bare bones and reply with an emoji.  I remember when I was in college my boyfriend wrote to me once a week (when we were in different countries.) I remember the heart giving a little leap of joy when I spotted that familiar handwriting in my cubby slot.  We have letters John’s grandmother wrote to his father at school. Pages long, flowery and descriptive text. They finish, I remain, dear son, your loving mother, B Quin-Harkin.  They had time on their hands in those days, didn’t they?

I've just remembered another irritating word. IRREGARDLESS. There is no such word. And a TV newscaster actually said OUTSIDE OF THE HOSPITAL. Grrrrrr. 

So what words or phrases annoy you?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, do NOT get me started. Looped in. Circled back. Reach out. As in: We reached out to them… Oh, I loathe that. You called them, you contacted them, you asked them, you emailed them, whatever. You did not reach out to them unless your arms were extended.

Impacted. Many people are impacted by..No no no no.

Gifted–as in, She gifted her a sweater. Gah.

There are a million of those. You know them. I will give you the fun of listing more!

Also!  There’s a construction that TV people seem to be using, and I know it has a real name as a grammar error, but I can’t think of it.

It’s : ”The police, they told us the criminal had escaped.”

Or:  “The trees, they turned out to be redwoods.”

Why not just say “The police told us the criminal had escaped”? 

It drives me absolutely nuts.

It’s wrong, isn’t it? 

GAH. 

LUCY BURDETTE: I have only one to add and you’ve heard it before but it makes me twitch when a restaurant or book or music reviewer says: “It did not disappoint.”

What does that even mean? Did they love it? Was it marginal? It’s a dreadful backwards way of saying you liked something, if in fact that’s what was meant. Okay, back to my writing cave…

RHYS: I just had that on a review: Bowen and Broyles never disappoint. Not Bowen and Broyles are always great/terrific/awesome/wonderful/brilliant!

JENN McKINLAY: Mine is a simple one. I get crazy when people say “go” instead of “said”. Gah!!!!

RHYS: How about "then we all" instead of we said?

HALLIE EPHRON: I’m with Hank on “gifted” — ack. But there are some perfectly good words that drive me nuts. Plop. And giggle. And petite. Probably says more about me than those words.

RHYS: In my next book, just for Hallie: the petite girl plopped onto the sofa and giggled.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I teach “Technical Communications” at a local community college; a course that’s a combination of the old “Business Writing” and more modern social media/ video/ presentations/ meetings rules. I always pass on a piece of wisdom my mother, a multi-degreed English teacher, used to say to me: “Never use a $14 word with a fifty cent one will do.”

My personal nails-on-the-chalkboard? The passive voice. Or, as one wag dubbed it, The Exonerative Tense. “Mistake were made.” “A Pedestrian was Hit by a Car.” “A burglary suspect was shot and killed in an officer-involved shooting.” It’s a journalistic version of that old family Circle cartoon where the parent are trying to figure out who broke the cookie jar and all the kids say, “Not me!”

DEBORAH CROMBIE: "My bad," tops my personal nails-on-chalkboard list. My bad WHAT? Judgment? Idea? It's usually used sarcastically, when someone is not really sorry at all. And if you really are sorry or think you made a mistake, why not just say, "I'm sorry," or "I made a mistake?" I wonder who started this particular bit of grammatical awfulness…

RHYS: Your turn. Let's hear the words that make you want to scream or throw something at the TV!