Copacetic is my least favorite word. I remember at the end the 1990s, suddenly everybody and their brother was using this word, and for some reason the word annoys me. I got to thinking about this when I read something on Facebook yesterday about how awful the word moist is, which got me to wondering: What is your least favorite word? (Excluding naughty language.)
12 comments:
Not sure I have a single "least favorite," but the relatively new term "listicle" is pretty high on my list of words I wouldn't miss if they disappeared from the language.
I dislike listicle both because it sounds gross, and because it describes the tendency of things to go very-low-content, very-high-ad, clickbaity stuff.
That's funny, I love the word "copacetic." It sounds so... I don't know... cool.
I hate the word "blog" and "weblog" isn't much better. I hate telling people I have a blog because I can hardly stand to say the word. Isn't there something else we could call these things?
I used to hate "bling" but I'm getting used to that one and I even use it once in a while.
I was surprised to learn that copacetic was actually not a new coining - it goes back to the 20s, IIRC.
I dislike disrespect used as a verb - "He disrespected me" for example.
Copacetic, which I believe can be legitimately spelled about 4 different ways, is also a word I like, I'm afraid.
cra-cra and some of these recent inventions that that don't even serve a real function. cra-cra is the same # of syllables as crazy and is longer, to boot
Is THIS what you read about moist?
Yup, that's it! Although that's far from the first thing I've ever read about the ickiness of 'moist'.
Moist is pretty bad. I don't like CLOTHING either because I can't say that word right. Poodle is my favorite word...say it with me...POOOODLE.
Um
When spoken, a bad habit.
When written, pretentious
There's a whole slew of words that annoy the hell out of me... depending on context. Most of these are perfectly fine in ordinary usage, but when they enter into the business writing that I see constantly at work, their usage becomes a little warped. Mostly these are verbs which strangely morph into nouns when used as biz-speak:
ask
solve
leverage
"Leverage," in particular, bugs me, because it's become so commonly used as a verb (rather than its original noun form) that it's passing into common usage and nobody seems to much care. I've been working in a biz-speak environment of one sort or another for 15 years now, and I still haven't gotten used to this stuff.
[I refer the commenter in this spot to Item #3 on my comments policy. I assure you that I know where to go if ever I should want to read a libertarian screed.]
Oh, you know what annoys me? Words that politicians use. Like "common-sense" and "the American people": "The American people are looking for us to devise common-sense solutions."
And bizspeak, as Jason noted, is awful.
It both amuses and surprises me to see the words that bug different people. Some of the words and usages mentioned are perfectly correct and not new at all. But that's okay. I'm sure there's something I hate that would make other people say, "What the..." What's wrong with that?" as I just did about a couple of these.
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