Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Irritating Phrases

A fellow blogger at Working With Words recently linked to an Oxford University study about the Top 10 Most Irritating Phrases. Here's the list and then I'm going to list some of my own. What are yours? What are those words or phrases that you get so sick of hearing or being used incorrectly.

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

These are mine:
1. YOU GUYS (How I hate this term! I always tell my husband that if the server at a restaurant calls me a "guy" I'm reducing their tip.)
2. I could care less (if you COULD care less that means you actually care.)
3. awesome ( very few things are awesome - maybe God, that's about it for me)
4. supposably ( I don't know how many adults I've heard say this - it's supposedly)
5. absolutely (I agree with this one - why is everything suddenly absolute?)

There are probably more I'm forgetting, but here are some new words or phrases in education that are used to sound progressive , but they are just new terms for old ideas.

1. short cycle assessments (aka - SCA)- this is what we call quizzes now.
2. summative assessments - this was formerly a test.
3. professional learning community (PLC) This is what we call a meeting now.
4. roll out - instead of introducing something, now we "roll it out"
5. front loading - this used to be called pre-teaching.
6. schema - instead of asking children how they learn the best, we tell them to discover their individual "schema".

10 comments:

Ruth Hull Chatlien said...

I love how they keep changing jargon just to make it seem like the ideas are new.

Susan's Snippets said...

My sister has a horrible habit of saying "yeah" all the time, I counted during one conversation 32 times she said "yeah"! And don't TELL her she is saying it...then she gets upset.

Here at the office a saying I hear is "I am currently out of pocket." Which, of course, means they are unavailable.

Why they can't just say that...I don't know.

joe

Moohaa said...

Roll it out... oh yeah, that's one that irritates me.

Also...

I'm exhausted .. exaggerations... grr.

The deal ... the deal is on the deal (as if it were a noun)

I'm sure there are more, but I can't think of them.

You're awesome... supposibly. :)

Moohaa said...

Oh ok, just remembered another one.

There, their, they're

Were, we're


Come on people, get it right!

bonnie said...

Oh yeah, I love this kind of post. "Gets your juices moving" (sorry). My most recent favorite icky is... "to be perfectly honest..." I feel like shooting nerf arrows at my daughter with increasing frequency for overusing this very boring phrase. I'm not a great fan of nucular or realitor, especially since they have politically wormed their way into the (Oxford????) Dictionary.

bonnie said...

Oh,KJ, what about your, you're? UGH! The WORST is their, they're, there.

Anonymous said...

At the end of the day... at this moment in time...absolutely.... Scream! Scream! Scream!
People seem to fasten on to a particular phrase and never let it go. The current big screamer for me is 'going forward'.

And the anonymous comment? Simple really, I couldn't have you going to my sadly out of date blog and discovering all the irritating phrases I use could I? LOL

Bogie said...

:) I like this post! It made me think what also irritates me..

Portable Soap Box Girl said...

People going to the libary (missing the r after b), saying fustrated instead of frustrated, and Setember. It kills me when people slaughter language. It collapses it instead of expanding it.

Pat Washington said...

I hate how often the adverb "hopefully" is misused. Ugh.