Wednesday, 1 January 2014

Are you a pedant?



I’m definitely becoming a pedant in my old age.  Although my husband is still worse than me, often picking me up on things I say.  The BBC have come up with a list of the 20 most overused words from 2013 as follows:

Twerk – must admit I looked this one up – was fairly sure I knew what it meant but didn’t want to show my ignorance by asking anyone!
Selfie – not in the habit of taking photos of myself so this one won’t be creeping in to my vocabulary
Passion
look
robust
so (must admit I’m guilty of using this one, even at the start of sentences!)
delivery
project
quoting someone else
doing – hmm this one does creep in
absolutely – and this one
fail
responsible (not a trait to put on your CV according to the article)
anyway – guilty of this one too                                          
yeah-no – my husband will say I definitely do this!
legacy
hipster
geek
iconic
hashtag – I do have a twitter account but it lies very dormant so I don’t have much use for hashtags
amazeballs – if this one every passes my lips hopefully it will only be because I’m quoting someone else, probably not in a good way!

Full details can be found here:


They’ve also come up with 20 of our most hated clichés:

and 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate:

5 comments:

  1. I am a pedant. I was taught by a wonderfully strict English teacher who used a bright red pen to strike out clichés and useless language. You have many of the same trite phrases as we do, e.g. 110%, and they are annoying.

    However, some of the phrases from your links are rather amusing to me, only because I have not heard them before. I imagine, were I to hear them on a regular basis they would go from amusing to annoying rather quickly.

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  2. I hadn't heard all the workplace ones, maybe because we're an education institution. Although sometimes I hear something said by a teacher and I want to cringe because it's not correct! lol

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  3. Twerk – I know about this. Can’t see me using it in conversation.
    Selfie – Well I do have a lovely new camera so……
    Passion
    look
    robust
    so
    delivery
    project
    quoting someone else – I do this.
    doing
    absolutely
    fail
    responsible
    anyway – guilty
    yeah-no
    legacy
    hipster
    geek
    iconic
    hashtag – Oh Yes! I LOVE hastags ###### They come in very useful if you want to get the attention of a customer service department with a complaint. #ToysRus before Christmas with complaint. Had a telephone call from them 10 minutes later. You would wait longer than that to be put through if you phoned them!
    #mothercaeruk yesterday to complain about non delivery of Saskia’s Pram system,which we paid premium delivery on. Reply from them today. They are looking in to it.
    amazeballs – No Just No Ridiculous expression.
    Apparently my most used annoying word is awful.

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  4. oh dear I'm guilty of; so, doing, absolutely, anyway and really..........really HAS to be in there somewhere. But whats wrong with being responsible?? My daughters use yeah-no and that irritates me but the one that really irritates me is the way local kids substitute the word how for why. When I ask them something or try to tell them something, instead of saying why,which would be irritating enough but at least grammatically accurate, they say how....and that DOES annoy. Especially as they genuinely don't understand the difference :-)

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  5. Oh..........and........the real reason I came by was to say
    Happy New Year :-)

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