It is bad enough when people who bloviate for a living, especially to the press, become addicted to magic words. You know the ones I mean: the recycled windy phrases that might have expressed something useful once or twice, but now get dragged in whenever someone wants to look sage and authoritative. A “multi-pronged” approach to some problem, a group “comprised of” several lesser units.*
It is worse when the speakers (or writers) clearly do not even understand the words they are uttering.
“This is one of the few unforced errors of the Romney campaign to date,” said one senior Republican strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly. “Voters demand transparency, and what they saw as a sideshow became a central tenant of an unhelpful discussion that cost them.”
Okay, did the guy they interviewed actually say that (ignoring, to start with, far simpler constructions like “the focus of”, for a term more appropriate to the foundations of a philosophy or a religion, then using the wrong fucking word even for that)? Did the guy who took the quote write it down that way? And are there any copy editors anywhere at the Washington Post any more?
I shouldn’t let it rent space in my head, but I can’t help it.
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*This must drive other people crazy too. That post is my all time greatest hit, surpassing even the ones with “porn” in the titles.
My latest annoyance is the word iconic. It’s used far too frequently, usually about the mundane.
If things are mundane…you know, sort of square… the word should be icubic, I think.
This is humongously time absorbing and begs for a dollop of unformality and springy innocence.
The central tenants of journalism have been rendered mute.
So right! And what is an “unforced error?”
I can’t believe how many stupid-arsed errors I see in journalism these days, but that’s a particularly shriek-inducing example.