New Year's Resolution: fix our language

In hopes of returning the English language to a thing of beauty and conciseness, lets make sure to restrain ourselves from using any of this year's Banned words & phrases.

Of course this is a perfect place for myself, as a former English major and occasional English teacher, to gripe about a couple of my own least favorite manglisms (I made that word up, a trait which I share with Will Shakespeare himself ):

1. Word bloat -- This tends to be an American specialty. I am embarrassed by the constant inflation of our language so as to seemingly seem more important (there, I did one for you). Many--if not most-- of these come from our political leaders and spin doctors:

a. saying "in the interest of [public safety|national security|the bottom line|etc...]" whenever discussing anything of any importance. Makes it sound much more weighty than "for..", or "because of", or even not prefacing your remark at all. Just say it! The whole phrase has become as meaningless as clearing your throat.

b. "The fact is is we have to do consider [blah blah blah]". Notice how "is" shows up twice? It's all over our language. Again "The fact is", has become just another throat-clearing exercise, to the point where the speaker treats the whole phrase as just a noun. It's another meaningless preface tacked on to the front of our sentences. Mere verbal fluff.

Actually the "verbal fluff" category is so large I don't even want to discuss it in detail. Among others it involves the following examples:

to my mind
in my opinion
critically important
whether or not


c. Inapropriate use of the word "tragic" -- according to our news publishers, everything is a tragedy. Even if someone dies a completely accidental death, it is a tragedy. No; a tragedy is supposed to have meaning to it: the family is torn apart by the father's relentless ego and pursuit of money, or the mountain climber's overconfidence led to death of the team as he dragged them all down the side of a cliff, etc...

d. "Self-confident", "Self-conceited". You see both of these in action everywhere these days. They are not quite tautologies, but they are halfway there. By default, the word "confident" is about one's self. You only qualify it by adding to it, as in "I am confident in my team's ability". Self-conceited is even worse. How can you be conceited in someone else?

e. saying "irregardless" when what you mean is "regardless". Pray tell, how can you not regard something you are not regarding? The logic negates itself, making this one a candidate for my next category:

2. Contradictory phrases -- these are expressions which by their very definition are illogical. Often they are sayings which have mutated to something different (often exactly opposite) from what people think they mean.

a. saying "I could care less" when what you really mean is "I couldn't care less". Think about it. The way Americans say it now is completely illogical. You are trying to communicate that you don't care about something, ergo you care as little as possible about it, ergo you couldn't care less about it.

b. Using the phrase "that's just your opinion", as a way to rebut anything. Of course it is my opinion; otherwise, would I be saying it? This goes along with using the phrase "forcing your beliefs upon others" whenever someone actually believes something and says so. How can one force anyone to believe something other than what they believe? At gunpoint they might say what you want, but it won't change their belief. By definition, a belief can only be changed when people are convinced to change their minds.

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I'm not saying we should all speak the Queen's English, although the Brits do tend to use English in a more flowing and interesting way. Just compare the dry wit you see in televised Parliament sessions with the cranky overblown speech you see on C-SPAN.

No, just looking for a little sense, perhaps even some sensibility in our language.

Happy new year, and let's keep those tautologies to a minimum.

Noooooo!!! Not 'dude' and 'diva'!!

Jokes aside - I think the whole banning thing is just silly. Every language in the world is in progress of constant change. Esperanto didn't fly, so people took new course and started mixing and simplifying languages. In my opinion (phrase which is banished btw), we all can only benefit from it.

I agree that some things went too far, like ingeneous "all nouns can be verbed", but vast majority of new born phrases and styles don't 'downgrade' the language but only expand it. Some of the words are just useless placeholders ('you know'), but others are merely synonyms ('It's All Good'). When I think about it, some of banished words are just transaction phrases to make our speech more polished and better sounding to human ears. Not all of them make sense, some of them contradict themselvs, but all in all we can't possibly stop using them. These words come and go just like hollywood starts, and just like with starts every so often someone will try to analyze them when they should be entertained with their existence.

Hmmm... I agree that all languages are in a constant state of evolution, excepting those that are not commonly spoken. However, I think English is in a state of regression. New words that come out of the media, entertainment industry, business, government, etc. are usually just buzzwords with no meaning. They're used to achieve superficial product recognition and to invoke various feelings of anger, fear, or whatever in the public's collective conscious. A good example from the LSSU site:

"Weapons of Mass Destruction"

I agree that the phrase is largely meaningless. Give 10,000 angry people big rocks and let them run rampant through some upscale yuppy nieghborhoods and the weapons can cause mass desctruction.

The other thing that irritates me is the constant push of new generations to come up with new words or redefine existing words just for the sake of it. Phat. Cool. Wicked. Why bother? It results in glut and nothing more. On top of that, the word is immediately tarnished by the people using it, and eventually dies a cruel death devoid of all meaning.

And on a related note that rycamor should be able to respond to, I'm greatly disappointed with the quality of English education these days. When I was in English 101 my freshman year in college, we had peer review / editing sessions. The very first paper I was handed had almost NO complete sentences, almost all of the words over five letters spelled wrong, almost no punctuation, and gross misuse of various, common words. I handed it back and said I couldn't possibly make any suggestions because it didn't even have a coherent thought or any structure. Let's just say that when the introduction is spread haphazardly thoughout three quarters of the work, there's a problem.

Alright... I'm off my soapbox now, I suppose...

Hey, AlCapone,

The banning thing is a not meant to be taken seriously. It's just a fun scholarly joke. Anyway, the point behind the bannings are not to preserve English exactly as it was in the past with no changes. The point is to encourage better (meaning "more thoughtful") use of our language. There is just so much verbal B.S. flying around right now that it's hard to have a real conversation anymore.

I will be the first to agree that English--more than any other language-- is in a constant state of flux. That has been our strength. But that very strength is now being exploited by those with the least to say. Our language should become more clever with change, not less.

I think the biggest problem in American English right now is the constant "jargonese" by people who want to sound professional about something or other. A language should have purposes other than to make us money. We have such a rich heritage of expressions, metaphors, wordplay, etc... English is a treasure trove of a language, and the best parts of it are being lost. I remember listening to an author illustrate the migration of our language thusly:

World War I -- "shell shock"
World War II -- "battle fatigue"
Vietnam -- "post-traumatic stress disorder"

In the aftermath of battle, each generation had it's own phrase to describe the emotions of returning soldiers. Notice the migration is away from clear, visceral language toward pretensious abstract technical jargon? All to make the experts seem, well... more expert, I suppose. Pity, the clear vivid conversations we used to have are on their way out.



I simply couldn't bear to teach English, especially in South Florida. It was just too painful. In fact, in my old neighborhood, there was a grade school teacher who used to ask me for help because she didn't know how to use the comma properly, or what constituted a run-on sentence, or a sentence fragment. It was all I could do not to scream.

I don't know what the answer is to all this, but I suspect it has something to do with reading real literature rather than watching T.V. and reading self-help books. Two great American pasttimes...

ahhh, rycamor, ok. Yes, I have to agree that there are awful lot of 'badly worded' phrases in american society. It's just that I don't agree with large portion of words on http://www.lssu.edu/banished/ To me most of them look just fine...

And about teaching in fl... heh, I lived in orlando for 3 years, I know what you mean I've also stayed in miami for couple months... no hable ingles... I tried teaching math to those people(unsuccessfully), but I can't even begin to imagine what it's like to teach english there. And that's given I am a foreigner - they should be telling me how to write/speak.

My nomination is for "My bad". Instead of saying "I'm sorry", "Excuse me" or "I made a mistake", just use the hipper, nonsensical "My bad".

How do you go about possessing a "bad"? Can you steal a "bad" from someone and give it to someone else? Every time I hear this phrase, I want to punch the speaker in the mouth and then say "Oops, my bad" as a way of absolving myself.

As far as Florida, I would trade that english education for the one I had just a little north of there (AL).

We have our own english here: i.e. wepuhmadistricshun

Although the Florida is in the south, it is really more of the retirement community of the US instead of a southern state so I doesn't suffer as bad from our southerisms. It really bothers me sometimes when I think of what shape our education system is in. There were some english terms I had never even heard of in high school that I was confronted with as "basics of english" when I took 101.

I will agree that a lot of phrases are overdone, but the only solution is to really teach the kids to use english right in the first place.

this thread reminds me of the essay "Politics and the english language" by George Orwell. well worth a read if you like this sort of thing... i googled a copy at http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html

Good call, ghatzhat. That's one of my favorite Orwell pieces:

"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

How true that rings, almost 6 decades later.

It's not all glumness, though. In the U.S. we do have a couple of writers who carry on with the language criticism tradition, such as George Will and Paul Fussell. Also we have some great "call a spade a spade" writers, such as P.J. O'Rourke.

English is a fun language. It's kind of like Perl. It has many ways to do the same thing, and they are often not mutually compatible. It gives you amazing flexibility, which comes attached to a long, shiny rope with which you can hang yourself repreatedly .

One of my favorite books on English is Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way. (Check out the opening pages in this link--its a hoot.)

Hmmm (another throat-clearing thing) .. you seem to have missed out my personal bete-noire, apostrophes.

This causes me more chagrin than anything else, especially as I see glaring errors every day, in real life

It's heartbreaking, especially as we used to get a detention at school if we got it wrong !

Are you the "its not it's" guy at Slashdot?

Just kidding. Yes, I agree that the apostrophe is used completely indiscriminately today. It's so bad it requires a complete thread of its own here. (its, and it's used here in their correct form).

One of my peeves is when someone is about to tell you what they think, and they start by saying, "I, myself..."

What about the old classic "exactly the same"?

Y'know, about the apostrophe thing (sorry... tasteless joke): I actually remember when I learned about the difference between its (possesive form of it as in "its head" - the head belonging to it) and it's (contracted form of "it is"). I was in the cafeteria in 10th grade with a handwritten English paper replete with tears and stains when one of the people on "guard duty" took it from me and read it. H