Retiring Phrases

Scott Hardie | April 15, 2016
What phrase do you think you should stop using so much?

I'm trying to retire "I enjoyed the hell out of" from my vocabulary (when describing some activity that I liked). I've used it numerous times on this site, like here and here and here and here and here. I'm turning into a broken record.

Scott Hardie | April 17, 2016
The AV Club has some phrases that I'd like them to retire, such as "whiplash-inducing" and "as is their wont" and "acquitted themselves nicely."

Samir Mehta | April 17, 2016
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Steve West | April 17, 2016
I'd like to eliminate the word "co-conspirator". There cannot be a conspiracy of one therefore any person involved in a conspiracy is, by definition, a "conspirator. The "co-" business is redundant and irksome. But here's one I want to eliminate from my own usage - "Happy Holidays". It's okay to celebrate any religious holiday despite it not being one in which I have any faith and vice versa without fear of insult to either party. So - no more of that.

Scott Hardie | April 17, 2016
Samir.

Good point, Steve. For my part, I don't say "happy holidays" or "merry Christmas" or "happy Hannukah" or any other such phrase; I just stick with generic greetings and partings like "take care" and "good to see you" regardless of the season. It's not about political correctness; it's about feeling bad that I don't know the friend or acquaintance or co-worker better to know whether or not they're celebrating. If it's someone who I'm certain is going to celebrate Christmas, I might say "merry Christmas," but I have too many Jewish friends who don't observe Hannukah and too many black friends who don't recognize Kwanzaa, and I'd be embarrassed if I wished them a happy one, because I'd feel like I should know them better than to say that. And I am ignorant of other holidays outside of those three; the Muslim and Hindu calendars I have to look up to know the days, and Easter and Passover move around. Anyway, political correctness is more than a little out of control, and we really need to stop the toxic annual cultural wars over what seasonal greeting appears on Starbucks cups and so on. Very few people actually care.

Erik Bates | April 18, 2016
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Scott Hardie | April 18, 2016
I like that. However, if you really want to get comfortable with silence, it's easy to work on. Just stop talking and accept that a few people are going to find it weird that you prefer silence to small talk. :-)

Scott Hardie | December 20, 2019
I'm getting tired of the phrase "speak your truth" ("speak her truth," "speak his truth," etc). For example, the just-concluded season of Survivor had a sexual harassment incident where a woman was voted out after complaining about a man touching her, and after weeks of controversy about this, she finally got to talk about this publicly at the reunion show at season's end. The host invited her to "speak your truth" on stage, and several articles talked about how she finally got to "speak her truth." It's becoming an annoying cliché from overuse in the #MeToo era, and it's an amorphous, feel-good phrase anyway, lacking specificity. I grant that it's more poetic than "say what happened," but I'm getting tired of hearing it.

"War on" and "Wars" is another rhetorical trope bothering me lately. I myself have recently used the phrase "culture wars" because it's a convenient shorthand for propagandists and politicians and publishers and other figures who have an interest in dividing us against each other, but the phrase takes on lots of other forms. Disney+ and Netflix are now engaged in the "Streaming Wars." Republicans complain about a "War on Christmas." Democrats complain about a "War on Women." The phrase is so overused that Wikipedia has a whole article about it. Have we lived so long in absence of the horrors of real international war that we forget how awful and devastating it is, and cheapen it by applying it to something as innocuous as streaming TV companies?

Are there any other phrases bugging you lately?

Scott Hardie | January 18, 2020
I'm getting really tired of Republicans saying that "Democrats just can't get over the fact that Trump won in 2016." I constantly hear this phrase in response whenever Democrats criticize Trump or want him held accountable for his transgressions. I talk to a lot of Democrats, and by the time Trump was inaugurated, it was pretty well settled fact among them that Trump was legitimately elected and it was time to move on. Not once since then have I heard a Democrat pining for Hillary Clinton and wishing she had won, or expressing some kind of denial that Republican candidate Trump had really won.* This belief is nonsense and it's time to let it go. It's also a weak defense of Trump's misdeeds, a variation of the whataboutism that he practices.

*To be clear, I still find it weird in the very long view that Donald Trump is president -- not 2016 candidate Trump, but real-estate-developer, reality-TV-character, Pizza-Hut-pitchman, failed-university-backer, steak-and-necktie-salesman Trump, the Trump who's been a celebrity for decades. That that guy was elected president of the United States is weird. Remember in Back to the Future when 1955 Doc Brown asked 1985 Marty McFly who's president, and when McFly said "Ronald Reagan," Brown asked, "And who's the vice president? Jerry Lewis?" That's how it feels with Donald Trump in the Oval Office. But that's not the same thing as refusing to accept the outcome of the 2016 election.

Scott Hardie | June 12, 2020
More phrases I am tired of hearing:

- Regarding the election: "Are Trump and Biden really the best we can do?" I keep hearing variations on this, like "we're a country of hundreds of millions of people, and these two bozos are the best we could find?" It's the same every four years, perhaps especially in 2016. You know what? Trump's still an abnormality, but Biden is pretty normal. Like him or dislike him, you have to admit that he's a pretty conventional presidential candidate of the sort that we've gotten in pairs every four years for most of our modern history. I don't get the complaining that we could somehow do better. To a centrist inclined to dislike both Trump and Biden, really, please name me the rock-star candidate who would thrill you.

- Regarding the coronavirus: "Why do people say 'we're all in this together' when so many people are selfish and not taking precautions? We're clearly not all in this together!" Um, that phrase is not directed at you, Mr. Safety. It's directed at the morons who don't listen to common-sense advice about how to avoid spreading infection. It's an admonishment to them. Don't take it personally.

- Regarding the George Floyd protests: "What the media doesn't want you to see is {these cops kneeling with protesters | these cops and protesters hugging | these residents of a damaged neighborhood cleaning up | etc}." Really? If the media won't tell those positive stories, then how did you hear about them, and how did I hear about them? That stuff is all over the media. If anything, the media spends too much time on those feel-good stories, because it stalls the coverage of important stuff happening elsewhere. There's a reason that "dog bites man" isn't news while "man bites dog" is. This isn't rocket science.

- Regarding police brutality: "Most cops are good people! They risk their lives for us and don't deserve hate! I stand with cops!" Now you need to express this feeling? Right this very minute? People are hurting. Read the fucking room.

Samir Mehta | June 15, 2020
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Scott Hardie | July 2, 2020
I think you have a good point, Samir. We spent so much time in our bubbles hearing what we want to hear that when we encounter each other, we tend to spout the phrases and notions pumped into us instead of listening or just being honest about our own thoughts.

Here's another thing that I'm getting very tired of hearing: That the looters, vandals, "rioters," statue-topplers, and other criminals in the middle of these racial injustice protests are getting a free pass from authorities. "Why aren't they being held responsible?" "Our cities are overrun and the mayors are just letting it happen!" "Because they're liberal, they get away with rioting!" What in the hell? There is plenty of proof of cops going overboard in crowd-control. The cops are definitely doing more than their part to crack down, including on the peaceful protesters that vastly outnumber the criminals. What free pass do they think anyone is getting here?

Samir Mehta | July 2, 2020
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Scott Hardie | July 23, 2020
Speaking of people looking for any data points to support their position: I'm getting tired of the phrase "Democratic-run cities," especially in light of the ongoing protests and President Trump sending in federal officers. The implication is that Democrats either don't know how to manage a city or don't care to do it correctly, letting politics overrule their judgment. John Kass just wrote a widely-circulated piece repeating this nonsense. Besides its bias, a big problem with the phrase is that most major cities are run by Democrats. Urban centers overwhelmingly tend to vote blue. Of the top 25 American cities by population, 4 of them have Republican mayors. So yes, large cities happen to be the site of ongoing protests, and yes, large cities also happen to have Democratic mayors, but correlation is not causation, unless you're determined to read some kind of meaning into it like Kass.

Steve West | July 23, 2020
"Letting politics overrule their judgment". That would be why the commander-in-tweet is still in office.

Samir Mehta | July 23, 2020
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Scott Hardie | August 10, 2020
More phrases that need retiring:

"Mississippi's state flag is the last one based on the Confederate flag." I just read this again in an article about Mississippi finally giving up that emblem as they redesign their flag, but that's not really accurate. The stars and bars live on in Alabama's flag and Florida's flag. Furthermore, North Carolina's flag and Virginia's flag were both created during secession and barely changed after reintegration. Granted, now that Mississippi is changing their flag, the phrase will probably disappear.

"Critics hate horror movies." I heard this old nugget of (false) conventional wisdom again recently. It takes other forms too, like "critics can't stand Adam Sandler movies" or "critics don't get Tyler Perry movies" or "critics only like dramas." No, that's just not true. The fault lies not with critics but with the genres: Drama tries to make you feel sad and/or inspired, which is fairly easy to do, so many dramas are successful. It's far more difficult to make you feel scared or to make you laugh, so horror and comedy have a much higher failure rate. When one does work, critics reward it with high praise, for instance Bridesmaids or Spy or Dolemite is My Name, or Get Out or A Quiet Place or The Babadook.