Words and Phrases That Should Be Tortured and Killed
Okay, I get it. Language is derivative; language is fluid and ever-changing, adapting to the times. Cool. Far out. Totally. Choice. P honus-balonus (bet you don’t recognize this one, do you? It’s from the 1920s; means nonsense or, more colloquially, “bullshit.”). I also get slang, idioms, dialect, colloquialisms, and all the lingual variations that verbal communication implies. I understand that, like, the vast majority of us are not, like, linguists, or writers or, in these times of social media, even, like, literally, decent texters or bloggers. And I think it’s, like, a generally accepted fact of life and society— any society —that most people are, like, at best only okay talkers. Which is to say, most people talk like they drive: only aware of themselves, in a hurry and unconcerned with how they get there, careless, oblivious, ignorant of the “rules of the road.” Oratorically, they don’t care how air-headed they sound if the person they’re talking to gets the idea. ‘L...