I think I’ve heard quite enough of the word extreme lately. We have extreme sports and extreme soda and extreme fashion, among other extremities. There’s even an extreme sex (trendily spelled “Xtreme”) web site devoted to “poz-hungry men into bareback sex”. The word extreme tops my list of the most annoying marketing terms of the late 90’s. I recently heard a radio ad for some snowboard-skate-bungee-bike demo which must have repeated the word about 20 times in 30 seconds. Enough already…
Coming in a close second is fierce, the marketing term of the hiphop/clubkid generation. Lord Martine, token fluffy gayboy columnist for the SF Examiner, manages to use the word at least twice in every column, it seems. Is it just me, or does fierce already sound about as hackneyed and cliched as groovy did in the Brady Bunch years? On the edge and its cousin edgy have held up a little better, but not much…
Cliches from the corporate world are always an easy target too. One more growing our business or empowering our co-workers might push me over the brink of nausea. Growing a business makes me wonder just which potting soil or mulch I should be using. Empowerment in the 90’s usually involving making workers responsible for implementing and defending policies they had no say in creating, which more or less equals getting yelled at so that upper management doesn’t have to.
Of course, upper management is usually too busy officing, networking, downsizing, ramping up, profit-taking, strategizing, and working on goal-achievement models and paradigms. Or (no doubt) selecting the proper fertilizer with which to grow the business.
These same executives can often be found working the web or cruising the Information Superhighway. The Internet has generated a whole new set of annoying and cliched terms which make me nuts. Of course, there’s obvious annoyance factor of cute misspellings like kewl (which should have been banned by AOL about 1995) and shorthand like BTW, FWIW, OTOH, and IMHO (which I admit to using myself on occasion).
My real favorite is, of course, send me an email. I’ve already babbled about this one. I will send you email. I will send you some email. I will email you. But I will not send you an email. Email is a collective plural (just like “mail” and “food”), so I will also not go to the post office and send you a mail or go to the grocery store and buy you a food.
A close second is our Internet address: Would that be your web URL, your email address, your FTP site, the message ID for your insipid Usenet spam, or what?
Then there are your obvious oxymorons like Microsoft Works and America Online (and maybe high-speed modem connection?)…
Redundancy is a big pet peeve too. My favorite right now is sex pervert. Isn’t the sex part somewhat implied? Do sex perverts eat at “food restaurants” and lurk in “book libraries”?
Other terms no one’s allowed to use in my presence this week:
- Celebrating our sexuality: What, with cake? or a covered dish supper maybe?
- The Year 2000: Why not “the year 1998” or “the day Thursday”?
- I could care less: Well…so could I. What I think you mean is “I couldn’t care less”
- Irregardless: Check your dictionary…it’s not a word!!!
- The Gay Community: Just what do I have in common with the yuppie robots and tourists on Castro Street other than a shared passion for sucking dick?
Hmmm…this was fun. Anybody care to add a few?