words and phrases due for retirement
It is usually a good practice to have your house in order before start shitting on your neighbours, lest you be shit upon yourself (I know there are more appropriate analogies, but they all seem so cliché). Criticizing writing can be a dangerous thing to do. If you do so and make a typo (something I may well be doing right now) then you look like an idiot. As haste and sloth often trump good editing in my writings here on aov, I am in no position to criticize. However, if we all just stood around waiting for someone without sin, some much needed stones would go un-thrown.
What follows is a collection of words and phrases that, after noticing how dumb they make people sound, I am striving to avoid using myself:
- "First and foremost" - Often used by public speakers, primarily politicians, looking to create an artificial depth and emphasis. Although the alliteration is awfully alluring, this phrase has been robbed of any meaning it may have originally had.
- "At this time" - Often used by amateur public speakers, this phrase is oddly prevalent in Church settings ("I'd like to call on the choir at this time"). I suspect that there are people who use this term while speaking in church but never in any other setting. This has always confounded me. If you remove the phrase 'at this time' from your sentence, it is no less meaningful.
- "If you will" & "per se" - No, thank you. I will not.
- "Nothing but respect" - I have nothing but contempt for people who usually use this term to artificially sweeten their sour criticism.
- "Utilize" - See "use".
For a more intelligent and less derivative position on clear writing see George Orwell's article Politics and the English Language where he declares that "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
I don't know. File under: maxims that sound impressive, but have little to say. Or: maxims that fail to follow their own advice.
I'm trying to remember the reporter on CBC who used to say "at this current point in time." You mean "now"?
1. Never use a big word when a diminutive one will do.
2. Eschew obfuscation.
(teeeheee chuckle!)
Most irritating phrases:
1. "24/7" - no one does it - if you did you would die within a month of sleep deprivation. Somehow does not have the moron-thought pit-wax connotation of "110%". [I prefer to use "4.45/12" = each week of the month, each month of year. It means the same thing but is patently silly];
2. "thinking outside the box" - anyone who says it is not.
3. "world class" - anything that needs the advectival attachment is not.
4. "Islander" - one major pet peeve is the use of this word [especially by CBC radio] to mean [at various times] human, human of fixed genetic heritage, human one gives a hoot about, resident, resident of scots-irish extraction, or any folk the term-user likes. [A verbal affliction of residents of any non-continuous land mass which is used without awareness of use by residents of all other non-contiguous land masses: see also "The Island."] A new term needed to distinguish amongst Anticosts, Newfs, Capers, Tancooks, Machias Sealers, etc.
Al
PS I do not mind "per se" when used correctly - like "paradigm" - but over misuse has made them practically speaking beyond salvage.
This is just a mangling of Occam's Razor, and is obviously false. I think it is wildly wishful thinking to assume that the simplicity of an explanation is in any way related to the use of the explanation. There are many ideas which are "intelligent," but can not also "be put simply".
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
Sincerity has nothing to do with clarity of language.
Sincerity has nothing to do with clarity of language.
I have to disagree. While a sincere or insincere person can obviously speak clearly or otherwise, I think that insincerity does make for more fertile ground for unnecessarily complex language. We've all tried to mask our ineptitude or insincerity with complex language at some point. I've caught myself doing it in meetings before (always a bad sign).
Due to Alan's 'grasshopper' jab, I've realized that this website has an unusually high Guru-to-User ratio: Matt, Alan, Peter, Kevin, Dave, Rob - all gurus of their own odd domain. Come to think of it, my apartment has a high Guru-to-Person ratio too.
"Yes sir, my software application will robustify the system via modular calls to robustification methods. Robust.".
I wonder if sincerity has become so demeaned by the age of irony that we can no longer recognize it. For me, I would think that it should be used as the honest belief that what you are saying is so. It does not relate to the fact being conveyed but ernestness in the validity of the fact. A person can be sincere. A fact cannot.
sin·cere
Pronunciation: sin-'sir, s&n-
Function: adjective
Inflected Form(s): sin·cer·er; sin·cer·est
Etymology: Middle French, from Latin sincerus whole, pure, genuine, probably from sem- one + -cerus (akin to Latin crescere to grow) -- more at SAME, CRESCENT
Date: 1533
1 a : free of dissimulation : HONEST 2 : marked by genuineness : TRUE - sin·cere·ly adverb synonyms SINCERE, WHOLEHEARTED, HEARTFELT, HEARTY, UNFEIGNED mean genuine in feeling. SINCERE stresses absence of hypocrisy, feigning, or any falsifying embellishment or exaggeration . Second: Including my own business. We've never been working harder and it's never been tougher... not even in the early going. There's a desperation "out there" that , in the past, I might have romanticised or ignored. I'm finding it harder to do lately. I'm finding good clients are harder to find. I'm not talking about dollars either. It's about trust. It's coming up on seven years for my biz and a change is gonna come. i'm working up what i hope will be a *sincere* atonement and penance.
- sin·cere·ness noun
To Alan, I hasten to point out that I included myself in the list of possible enemies to clear language. And like you, i think, that I've yet to meet a person in my industry who believes that they have ever lied or committed any acts of dissimulation. That said-- baby -- the sins of omission! Lately, I have been feeling a sense of corruption touching so many things.
a fact is neither sincere nor insincere but the person that uses it is.
You can be absolutely insincere, and not resort to the "long words and exhausted idioms," that Orwell is so concerned about. I think Bill's statement quoted above is an excellent counter-example: "I did not have sex with that woman." He is being insincere, and depending on your definition of "sex" he also is being dishonest, but his insincerity doesn't muddy his words. He could not have been any clearer.
I am very strongly against the idea that an artist, of any kind, is doing his/her job by being sincere. If Lennon wasn't sincere when he wrote "Imagine" it doesn't mean anything less to someone who hears it and agrees or disagrees with it. An artists sincerity, what they intend by any piece of work, is interesting, but not essential.
Was Di Vinci doing his job as an artist when he painted the Mona Lisa? Surely we can say yes, though we don't know what he intended by his work, or whether he was sincere in its creation.
As one of my professors once said: "If you're really as smart as you say you are you can write in a way that just about anyone can understand. There are plenty of academics out there that claim to know their shit, but if they can't express it clearly it doesn't mean a damn thing."
Big ideas don't have to be expressed with big words.
For the record, saying "rhetorical persuasive language" is redundant. By definition rhetoric is persuasive, or at least attempts to be so. In effect you're saying "persuasive persuasive language."
What are you using as your definition of rhetoric?
Steve, I was hoping it was Ben Foulds.
Alan- What is the Pope trying to do when he reasserts tenents? He's telling them (or dare I say it...persuading them) to keep believing. Reinforcing beliefs is a form of persuasion, which in turn is rhetorical.
On an unrelated note, I have a bone to pick with Ben Folds. I spent the last two academic years in Winston-Salem, NC. You know that song where Ben is in the hospital and he says "Silas Creek Parkway is my only view?" I lived the on the next road over. He used to play at Ziggy's in Winston-Salem all of the time. In fact, bits of Ben Folds Five's live album were recorder there. So I like I was saying, I lived there for 2 years and he didn't play there once! So I graduated, moved back to PEI, and guess who played at Ziggy's last week?
Thanks for nothing Ben Folds. We all know you'd be nothing without John Mark Painter anyway, right Steven?
And for the dumb and confused, the John Mark Painter that Ben refers to is the John of super-cool-but-never-famous band Fleming & John. They are also from the colder Carolina and are chummy with Mr. Ben Folds. They once accompanied Ben on a bizarre William Shatner spoken word performance on the Conan O'brien show.
Could we have a show of hands of who owns a signed copy of their first CD please.
...
(you can see it but I'm actually raising my hand)
Also, Ben, I think it's only fair that you know that Alan is a lawyer.
But he's still a relatively nice person, and half bright too.
(Sorry, to keep quoting things, I don't know a better way to do this.)
Again, this can be true, but isn't necessary. Metafiction often makes a point of showing the reader the ways in which a text is "false". Robbe-Grillet, whom I loathe, decided that because all fiction is essentially psychological drama in one form or another, that he would write stories which offer no psychological insight concerning the characters or their motives. The stories are also completely non-linear and fragmented, there isn't any real "plot" to fall back on. The idea is that it's ultimately the reader who decides on meaning. Dadaists purposely created random works of art - people still found meaning in them.
Art is subjective. Eye of the beholder and all that nonsense.
Matt: I haven't got a clue what metafiction is - few things splapped with the prefix "meta" do - but what you are describing is very similar to a book from about 200 years ago by Laurence Sterne which was a reaction to the form of the novel in which he makes fun of the suspension of disbelief and the dramaticization of life. One page is fully inked, for example, to describe night. On my tour of the modest taverns and art galleries of Europe 15 years ago now, I go to see some Dadaist stuff - the stool with the bicycle wheel, the urnal placed eight feet up the wall - and that is the same thing. Meaning is there though the conventions of "clarity" within the form are all messed up.
One of my petpeeves is the misuse of the word "rhetoric" and one of my hobbies is debating. Toss the two together and I can go on for hours.
Rhetoric happened to ne my field of study by the way.Of course, given the way academia works rhetoric and communication is a fractured (and broad) field and I was biased by the views of those I studied under.
And since Steve started the hand raising...raise your hand if your name appears in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Rhetoric.
Yup. That's my hand in the air.Sure, all I got was a mention from my advisor, but it's still my name in cold black print.
Nice to meet you folks. Good to "talk" to you again Steve.
Quietly confident - If you've written/typed/said that, you're not being quiet about it.
BLACK ICE -- From the weather and news reports. Ice is ice. Watch your step. “Ice is usually clear and shiny when you see the black pavement through it.” Robert Irving, Tahoe City, California.
This is simply incorrect. If there is no light behind the ice from the perspective of the viewer there is no "shiny". Probably Bobby Boy never bought winter treads.
"in all seriousness"
Trying to force a word like rhetoric into one use or definition is useless. Words have meaning because we give them meaning. They are arbitrary symbols made up of phonemes and, physically, lines and scribbles.
A word means something (or various somethings) because that's what people think it means, whether one person or a whole country likes it or not.
Theory aside...one "word" I think should be retired (should never have gotten the job in the first place): irregardless.
Nuff said.
I hesitate to make any judgements on words and language because it's like a living, breathing organism. It shifts, morphs, dies a little, dies completely.
Aside from that, I agree with Orwell. People have been trying for years to improve on this article and few have done it. It remains a guide for debate and study (along with McLuhan) for communication and rhetorical theory.
