It’s not that I’m turning the negatron (the emotion, not the Transformer) meter to high, but saturation points, across the pop culture board tend to have the same effect: Annoyance and a severe distaste to its proximity. And I’m not even referring to the club uniform of the past three years: The garter bodycon plus platform pumps combo, (which, by the way, needs to be retired already). I’m referring to phrase pests — verbal habits that manage to inject themselves before, after, and even in-between every sentence. Words that are misused, overused, and stretched to the point of general redundancy that they’re almost considered useless.
I understand the need to be part of an interactive society that has its finger on the jargon pulse, but whatever happened to the simplicity of a “yes” or a “no?” What happened to the ability of one remark to translate to a precise meaning? If our dialogues were constrained to a 500-word count, everyday jargon would exceed the limit. I’m not washing my hands clean of this though, because as my friends can attest, I use so many words derived from swardspeak that I can actually pass off for a gay man. Analyzing this modern way of communicating, I realized that we talk the talk because these little local spikes of verbal expression make us belong. According to Wikipedia, colloquialism is referred to collectively as “youknowwhatitis” language. And aren’t we all know-it-alls in some subconscious level of our existences?
But those little rhetoric drops, like consistent water beads falling on a drum, sometimes result in such hair-tearing and head-banging-on-the-wall frustration. That may be an exaggeration, but my reaction always is an involuntary cringe and inward eye roll, if that’s even possible, but you get the gist. There are some words that need to rest and given a proper dictionary burial. So in the branch of turning over new leaves, (I’m still in the resolution fever), I’ve asked people about their word peeves. It’s the same lingual context for some, but for others, it’s just a trend. For one who wanted to remain anonymous, it’s a transitive verb: “reveal” — in the usage of showing-off purchases because as he says, “bragging about purchases is so 2004.”
For The Grammar Grave
For me, it’s: “I know right?” and the world “like” used in between every sentence. Like, I know right?