I like words. I am a writer. Playing with words is both my job and my passion. I like to turn words around in my mouth, experiencing the taste and feel of them the way other people do with good wine or chocolate. Writers are sometimes called wordsmiths, and I very much like that term, because wordsmithing is a good way to describe what we writers do. Words are our raw materials. We take the best ones, the strongest ones, the right ones, and we put them together with other words, and we forge sentences, paragraphs, entire books, and-- if we're good enough at it-- careers. On a day when the writing isn't going well, my mantra is "Keep putting one word in front of the other," and that gets me through the rough patches.
Despite this, I do have some words that I seriously hate, words that act on me like fingernails on a chalkboard. And they aren't the words you might imagine. I have a potty mouth of epic proportions. Hey, if you're good at a thing, right? I think one of the reasons swear words are so taboo (if you believe that they still are) is because they are very powerful words, among the most powerful in the English language. Or maybe any language for that matter, but I don't know how to cuss in, say, Mandarin Chinese-- but how cool would that be if I could! So anyway, here are some of the words that I really hate:
Moneys. Is $2 money and $3 moneys? Where does "money" end and "moneys" begin?
signage. I can't think of a grammatical situation where just plain "signs" wouldn't suffice. Signage is possibly the most pretentious of words.
Edgy. I don't really know why I dislike this one so much. Actually, I like the sound of it. Maybe it's the overdone nature of the word that I'm rebelling against, and the subjective nature of it. Maybe one person's edgy is another person's bid for attention. I mean really, what does this word mean?
I have other words that I simply don't use or will wrinkle my nose up at, but these three in particular produce a disproportionately violent reaction. What about you? any words that get under your skin? What about words you really like and have to exercise great restraint to keep from overusing?
1 comment:
My boss loves to describe the current subprime lending market as a "financial tsunami." I hate this term so much, mostly because it's so incredibly exploitative. It's like "drink the Kool-Aid." It uses a tragedy to sell things, and I think it's kind of sick. It makes me want to popularize the term "a Holocaust of savings!" as a marketing tool.
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