A few early adopting bloggers are getting up in arms over LOLCatspeak taking over their precious interwebs. Add to that list of grievances, the Oxford University Corpus’s list of the top “irritating phrases,” which came out last week. Here’s the list:
1 - At the end of the day
2 - Fairly unique
3 - I personally
4 - At this moment in time
5 - With all due respect
6 - Absolutely
7 - It’s a nightmare
8 - Shouldn’t of
9 - 24/7
10 - It’s not rocket science
Really pretentious pasty folk at Oxford, really? This is what you are up in arms about? Most of these phrases would appear on some sort of rejection letter sent to you by a college that didn’t let you in because you were too stoned in high school or a job that doesn’t want you running around drunk and taking off your pants at their corporate Christmas party. Very few times are these words uttered aloud by actual humans - unless you live with a chunky British butler. The only phrase I found truly irritating was number 8 - because that is not proper English - and at the end of the day, that chaps my hide.
As for interweb speak, are people (who don’t claim to have invented blogging) starting to get annoyed with the unnecessary use of “the” in front of words that don’t need it in order to sound ironically old timey? What about making “internet”plural like Lame Fuck Duck did a few years back? Has that ship sailed? Not to mention all the totes adorbs abrevs and the STFU, LOLz, ZOMG, FTW of the world. And the spelling of things all zonky like gheys and bonar? Do we need to stop writing like assholes and bring integrity back to the language of the internet(s)? At this moment in time, we need to know. KTHXBAI.
Moar debate here.
Really, I think most of these are phrases we pick up through osmosis and use them because they’re part of the cadence du jour. I think I’ve used “at the end of the day” a few times too many, and every time I use it again, I wince at my linguistic laziness. We need to put an end to go-to phrases which get used so many times that they cease to be language and become empty noise.
Can we bring back hate speech?
Nostradamus and Better World…
I think that people are going overboard with all of this. I mean, there were predictions that we were gonna die in 2000 but we’ re still here. I mean, if the world hasn’ t blown up in 2000, what’ s another 12 years gonna do? In fact, when they we…