Please Stop Saying These
Marianne Janack and Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes
We come here to bury, not to praise, the following words and phrases.
Listed are words and phrases that we hope can disappear—or at least get used less frequently. We know, we know: the English language is alive and changing; words take on new meanings—blah blah blah. The moral of this descriptivist story is usually “thou shalt not prescribe how words should be used—one should merely describe, or go with whatever most people do.”
But we are unrepentant prescriptivists—and, of course, you might note that the moral of the descriptivist story is also prescriptivist. Indeed, we’re not so sure that one can avoid prescriptivism when it comes to language anyway.
The following list is not exhaustive.
~ Marianne ~
As the years have gone by, I’ve noticed a creeping administrative/technical vocabulary that undermines the goal of speaking and writing clearly and with verve. Remember people: administrative vocabulary (think of ‘playbooks’ and ‘best practices’) is meant to sound like it’s saying something when it’s not. It’s euphemistic, disingenuous. Furthermore, it’s become the 21st century’s technical vocabulary– as a badge of expertise by managers. It’s supposed to make people sound smart, but it tends toward vagueness. And for sharp, new, interesting, and creative language, we need the exact opposite.
We dedicate this newsletter to words and phrases have become trite and overused—and triteness is the refuge of lazy writers and speakers. The following are words and phrases we really hope you will stop saying.
Impact
Unless the topic is meteors or car crashes, or one is trying to capture the character of someone who is trying to sound smart or administrative, this word should be retired. It is not a synonym for “influence,” “affect,” or “change”. One of my former students sheepishly admitted that she doesn’t feel confident that she can distinguish between ‘effect’ and ‘affect’, so the use of ‘impact’ in written work might reflect this problem. However, this doesn’t explain its frequent use on the radio or in other spoken performances. This word has also now become an adjective: ‘impactful’, which seems to have vague connotations of ‘influential’ or ‘noteworthy’. Grossness knows no bounds.
Gift, as a verb
I recently got an email from a magazine that I subscribe to that urged me to “Gift a subscription!” “Give a subscription as a gift!” or “Make a gift of a subscription!” or even “Give a subscription!” would work just as well, but I suppose that the idea of shortening the sentence by saving words is too seductive for advertisers. But that doesn’t mean that the rest of us should do this. I recently heard a person talking about a trip she took to India with “a gifted yoga mat". You see the problem.
Pivot
Unless the topic is basketball or baseball, this one should be retired, too. “Let’s pivot to the topic of the budget,” or “I thought I would pivot my work so that I research stress, rather than researching how race and gender impact health outcomes” (yes, two sins in one sentence) are cases in which sports metaphors have become old and tired parts of the language. Maybe people who use these metaphors think that they’re fresh and new? I hate to be the bearer of bad news: the“pivot” metaphor is old and tired. It should be retired.
‘Get visibility on’ used as a synonym for ‘see’
Though this one hasn’t really become common, I’m worried that it will. I listen to NPR every day, and I’ve now heard this term used twice in one week: once by a Trump administration spokesperson, who was trying not to answer a question about the destructiveness of the attacks on Iran’s nuclear arsenal, so that’s understandable. But the second time I heard it, it was used non-ironically—horror of horrors— by an NPR reporter.
Please! The madness must stop.
Yet it goes on…
~ Gabi ~
While I agree with Marianne’s objection about vagueness and the creepy bureaucracy our language has become, lots of my complaints arise from another side of the newer generation’s attempts to evolve language: contractions, replacements, and slang that echo the emptiness Marianne finds in a quotidian pervasiveness. Others are too-common misuses, while the remainder, personal pet peeves.
I could care less.
There are instances when people mean this when they say it. For example, if your college essay advisor has spent hours working with you trying to figure out what your main framing device will be and then you bring nothing to the table, to emphasize that they could—and likely should—be working less, i.e. caring less, then it would be appropriate for them to say this.
But usually people mean, “I couldn’t care less” when, incorrectly, invoking this expression.
Babe, romantically.
Listen, okay, my mom calls me babe; I don’t have anything against the word itself. And, I don’t know where it came from, her calling me that, but, outside of that context, whenever I hear “babe,” I think of women who speak exclusively in vocal fry, men who wear backwards baseball caps and shield their eyes from the sun with a palm extended, and couples in middle school whose braces are in danger of entanglement when they lean in for the kiss. Just call your partner something else. Be creative for god’s sake.
(I can’t believe I am even writing this): skibidi toilet. Or just, skibidi.
As someone without social media, I get passed along the knowledge of new slang as it’s already well along its way in the mainstream. The phrase originates in the title of a YouTube series from which the slang term evolved. It—apparently—has no inherent meaning; it just functions as a filler word or can mean whatever its context enframes it into. If I could annihilate any word out of existence, I do think I would choose this over them all. First, the invocation of potty humor to me is vulgar; second, the total meaninglessness of the phrase is objectionable. Choose “um” or “like” or anything else, please. It seems to me that my generation started using it as an ironic term, but that the younger one has adopted it seriously, which should never have happened.
The last place I expected to encounter this term was in the high school I’m teaching at in Arequipa, Perú. But, once, when I let my students name their own teams, I ran up against a girl (funny enough my namesake), who proudly albeit giggly pronounced “skibidi” to me as her desired team name. Although as a pedagogical principle, I try not to quickly shut students’ ideas and suggestions down, I immediately––instinctually––responded “No.”
When she subsequently suggested “toilet,” I echoed my response. There was absolutely no way I was letting this jeopardy team bare either of these absurd terms as their names. Personally, I believe that I accept the evolution of language, of neologisms and verbal creativity. But that’s not what this term is about. Maybe I’m missing the dada of it all, but, to be honest, I couldn’t care less (wink).
Slay.
Stupid.
Overstimulated.
I believe this term derives from psychological diagnoses. But I’ve heard so many people say this now, in so many dumb contexts––eg. the music playing during trivia contests––that it has become a word that makes me squirm Overwhelmed suffices, no?
Hiiiii- but said with an elongated nasal emphasis on the vowel.
“Hello,” I’d respond to my coworkers at my previous job who used to greet me with this unlovely sound as I walked in from 5th avenue into the sunless store. “Why do you have to say it like that?” I’d think, walking to my locker.
Sorry, not sorry.
This is one of those passive aggressive phrases that the internet has weaved into our modern vernacular. People use it similarly to “no offense,” usually as a postscript/subscript to when they decide that they are going to go through with saying something that they know their listener may not necessarily appreciate.
What I dislike is the apology followed by its immediate rescinding. I am in favor of directness, or simplicity. You’re clearly about to say or have just said something that you know may be taken in the wrong (or the right but nonetheless offensive) way: just own it. Don’t give me a nothing phrase that shows your awareness of your bluntness-brimming-on-rudeness that simultaneously absolves you from the accountability that comes with saying it.
RIP
Although it’s an acronym that’s meant to signify “rest in peace,” I’ve always pictured a body being torn into two. It’s always felt like a violent term, like the dead have been ripped from life. I’ve only ever used it ironically.
Passed away
A euphemism for something sticky, that we don’t like to deal with, death. I don't know who it’s supposed to comfort more, the sayer or the listener. Death is uncomfortable, sit in it.
To do, as a verb for ordering food.
“I’ll do the chicken.” No. You’ll have the chicken. You would like the chicken. You won’t do the chicken. Why say it like that?
Prolly
Text message slang I first heard (or perhaps read) while in middle school and have hated with a passion since its first iteration in my life. Is “prolly” really much more economical than “probably?” Plus, does anyone even pronounce it like that, “praw-ly?” Personally, I doubt it, and this is up there for terms I find diabolically idiotic.
Wifey and Hubby
These are terms worthy of a cringe so deeply physical that your hairs don’t just stand up on their ends but in fact perhaps go up in small flames that leave you smelling like a bad hairdresser for the rest of the day. Hubby especially—what comes to mind here, according to a similarly-minded reddit user—is a pot-bellied, narrow-chested guy with an affinity for t-shirts with jokes on them. I more often picture the wife who decides to call her partner that term. And the image that comes to mind for her is skin-toned yoga pants (or those terrible patent leather leggings) who flirts with her gynecologist just to feel something.
While meant to be terms of endearment, I believe that these two similarly gross nicknames are terms of entrenchment in the world of pure corniness and cringe. If you say this, chances are you also have signs on your wall that say things in looping script, ones you unironically bought at HomeGoods that I hope you start regretting after reading this.
Technically used to mean the exact opposite
When speaking to my high school class about a program we did involving overseas travel to Luxembourg and an international schools conference, one of my classmates was asked how much amusement was involved. She responded, “Well, technically, we had fun.” Technically? Technically?!
How does one technically have fun? What the fuck?
Obviously, she didn’t have fun. I had tons, learning and lecturing and listening and laughing. And none of it was technical fun. Because, I don’t, in fact, believe that exists.
Literally or like, literally
“I, like, literally died,” my friend tells me, recounting the events of the night before, which involved a tad too many margaritas and a stroke too late past midnight. “I mean, yeah, you look like shit,” I respond, “but, no, you didn’t literally die. If you had, you wouldn’t be sitting here rubbing your temples over this too-sweet coffee.”
An eye-roll and a dismissal of my peculiar pickiness over her precision––or lack thereof––in her language use, “whatever, you know what I mean,” she says. “Do I push it further?” I wonder. I know what she means, yes, I do, but why have we decided––like technically––to employ a term to mean its polar opposite? I guess it’s to emphasize the severity or intensity of the happening. But we take away from our sense of reality when we say something literally happened when it didn’t.
Maybe someone could argue back and say, well, it’s just hyperbole; the whole point is to be over the top, pushing the bounds of real to emphasize the point. But to hyperbolize and to claim that something literally happened doesn’t seem to achieve either goal. To say something “literally” happened is to say that it actually happened, that it transpired in what we see as ‘the real/the real world,’ and put it on a plane of equal ontological standing as things that actually did.
I wonder if coming to a state of using literally figuratively so liberally has come from the fact that we now live in a world wherein it is difficult to tell the literal–the real–from the not-real. The obvious example is AI and ‘virtual reality’, of course, but even the notion of the uncanny valley invokes the violation of our understanding of what’s real and present that comes with the evolution of technology.
All I have left to say is, choose your words wisely. Albeit mere representations of reality, mere facsimiles, they influence, change, and warp our perspectives as we create our worlds. And our increasingly loose linguistic hygiene has left us with dusty dictionaries and flaccid vocabularies. Use literally, literally. Please.
Now this rant is literally over.
And the rest is silence, or at least we––like Hamlet––think it should be.