Chris Jansing on MSNBC just referred to the NJ boardwalk fire's beginning at "an iconic frozen custard stand." Puh-leese!!!
sagegrouse
This is part of a post I just put up on Facebook. Made for a nice surprise to start the evening.
Now if the Giants would just... just... ugh.Wore my Duke > UNC shirt to go grab a burger for dinner. Got a nice compliment on it, all the way out here in SoCal. Turns out the couple is from the Triangle and went to NC St. We had a lovely chat.
Chris Jansing on MSNBC just referred to the NJ boardwalk fire's beginning at "an iconic frozen custard stand." Puh-leese!!!
sagegrouse
Words I'd like to see retired:
-- Tar
-- Heel.
Also tired - grammar pedantry. Why should we care how people use the word literally?
That's a usage issue, not a grammar issue. How's that for pedantry?
What's the extent to which you're OK with people misusing words? Is "aggravate" for "irritate" OK? What about "ambivalent" for "indifferent"? I gave up on "comprise" for "compose" a long time ago but still have myprincipalsprinciples.
Yes. Geez, a thousand times yes. If there is some sort of petition I can sign to get "iconic" banned from use, I will renounce my right to free speech and sign it. It's a pet peeve for me on par with folks' apparent inability to learn the difference between "your" and "you're".
Also: "It goes without saying that..." - well gee I guess it doesn't, does it?!?
Oh, the irony of it all. Iconic imparts the state of being an icon on something or someone. Does ironic similarly impart the state of being an iron on something or someone? Maybe it's irony. All in is too general. Is it all in a pool, or in a quandary, or in a tub? Often it is a poker term for an seemingly idiotic strategy that seems to work more often than not.
Hella isn't in my dictionary, so what is it? Boots on the ground is a military slang term that that seems to have been learned in a boot camp, literally. Boot does seem to have multiple meanings which depend on just where the boots are located, like up your...
At the end of the day, it begs the question, what is epic pricepoint?
I agree that people should not be so harsh on common usage. If you know what they mean, well, isn't that the whole point?
My biggest irritation with this behavior is from my days as a tech writer. I can't remember how many times some person above me in the food chain harangued me for violating some rule they THINK they learned in Mrs. McGillicutty's class in 3rd grade, despite the fact that they were a programmer, manager, or candlestick maker. I could whip out as many copies of the AP Stylebook or Chicago Manual of Style as I could find, they were d*** sure Mrs. McGillicutty was right.
It literally drove me insane. (Granted, not a far trip for me.)
Because we enjoy language, and words, and appreciate when they're used cleverly or in a novel way or, at bare minimum, logically. So, redundancy and overuse becomes annoying, and we feel a little sense of sorrow when a nice, innocent word like "literally" comes to be commonly used to mean "figuratively" instead. Because it's lazy and/or confusing and reminds us of our basic human coarseness and imperfection, when we'd rather be reminded of our cleverness and creativity.
Seriously, though, no one here is all that serious about being a pedant (although I'd love to debate at some point whether caring about word meaning and grammar is "reinforcing an artifical hierarchy," or whether any hierarchy can be artificial, or to what degree reinforcing it is necessarily bad). We're just expressing pet peeves, mostly based on overusage. Some phrases become banal and should be put out to pasture. Does it not connote laziness and sheeplike lack of originality that every sports team fanbase now refers to itself as "________ Nation?" It's hackneyed. Likewise, Sage has a legitimate gripe regarding the word "iconic" - it's been applied to so many things/people that it has effectively lost any real meaning beyond "unique" or "old and well-known." Expansion of or shift in meaning is easier to accept, I think, in the evolution of language, than corrosion of meaning is. "Iconic" was a nice, precise word with a very specific connotation which recognized its religious origins. Now it's tired, means nothing, and has lost any connection to its own past. I think that's too bad.
Similarly, when a word becomes a verbal tic, devoid of actual meaning in a sentence, some of us just get tired of hearing it. Even worse, when common usage evolution of a word occasionally leads to it being used to denote its generally accepted antonym, it's irritating.
You reminded me of this: Common Knowledge
Tons of iconoclasm in this thread. Sigh...
Heretics.
Please go read 1984.
Also... sometimes you don't know what they mean! That's why correct usage is so important! For example, when someone tells me that they perused my website, do they mean that they skimmed it over, which is a common way that people misuse the word, or did they actually peruse the thing?!?!
Last edited by Edouble; 09-13-2013 at 08:21 PM.