Language fashions are very disturbing. It's like when everyone wears stripes and it doesn't matter if they make you look too thin or too fat, just as stripes usually do. Here's a short blacklist of words that have been annoying the hell out of me.
1. Disruptive. You can't make a step these days without being disrupted, usually by something revolutionary. "Check out this totally disruptive web2.0 thing I've come up with!" "Wow! Very disruptive!"
2. Vlogs, as in "you can stick your vlog up your vortal."
3. Conversations, as in "Hello, can I please have a pound of that ham over there please?" "Uhm, no, the Cluetrain manifesto says it's all about conversation these days. The disruptive ones." I don't mind a friendly chat, but why do I need to have a "conversation" every time I want my toilet unclogged?
4. Unwarranted portmanteau words: craptastic, fantastilicious. Oh, and "zen".
5. Made-up company names. It's like learning a foreign language, seriously: "Eskobo, trumba vimeo?" "Renkoo!!! Oy ogi yedda chatsum, zimbra bloglog qoop." We could use it as the new "lorem ipsum" filler.
Funny stuff! I dislike 'disruptive' as well, in addition to silly verbs and their past participles like "dugg"
ReplyDeleteI never want to hear: "I second-lived through a similar experience...".
Sometimes a made up name can be all-right though, if it has some resemblance to a real-life word or has an italian/spanish flair to it.
Vimeo is more of a re-arranged word than a made up one. It's the letters in "movie" mixed up.
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