Blog » Excuse Me, That's Not a Word
Excuse Me, That's Not a Word
It started with a little tweet about alot. Soon after, I tried to get through a post from a respected blogger and marketer who lost me with “impactful”. Not realising I was starting something, I asked the Twitterverse if “impactful” bugged anyone else and what non-words did they find annoying. It turns out I’m not the only one harbouring a few pet peeves about the English language.
Passionate Opinion
I’m a writer and a word nerd. I recently bought Peter E. Meltzer’s The Thinker’s Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words to keep myself entertained and inspired. It’s full of fancy-pants words I would never use in normal communication but they are all legitimate members of the English language. The respondents to my informal poll bombarded me with examples of words, phrases, common misspellings and errors in usage driving them nuts and, in some cases, spitting mad.
Public Service Announcement
As a service to anyone interested in evading the ire attached to the usage of these words, I’m providing a list. Use them at your peril. The overriding sentiment about non-word usage is it demonstrates lack of intelligence, education or attention to detail. If these words are appearing in your normal business communications and marketing collateral, my advice is to get rid of them and do it quickly.
The Top Offenders
Two words were submitted repeatedly. Obliterate them from your vocabulary.
- incentivise
- agreeance
Other non-words peeving the pets
In no particular order:
- supposably
- ideation
- positivity
- onboarding
- de-train
- de-plane
- onforward
- verbally facilitate
- unpacking (as in “unpacking the issues”)
- disaggregations
- misunderestimated
- conversating
- embiggened
- learnings
- irregardless
- anonymize
- operationalize
- Westralia
Errors in Usage
Plenty of people complained about real words being used at the wrong time or in the wrong context.
- enormousness vs. enormity
- thankyou vs. thank you
- round vs. around
- penultimate vs. ultimate
- hone vs. home
- momentary vs. momentarily
- phenomena vs. phenomenon
The evergreens in this category:
- lose vs. loose
- chose vs. choose
- there vs. they’re vs. their
- its vs. it’s
The Crux of the Matter
Arguing the validity of a word or its modern usage is pointless. When you write or say something distracting to your audience, you’ve lost your ability to inform and influence. While military jargon and business-speak easily invade our lexicon, it’s best to stick to straight talk and common words to express yourself. (Don’t get me started on SMS text.) The best way to impress is to speak and write in a way that reaches everyone and offends no one.
What words annoy you? What would you add to this list?
*Image courtesy of Topgold at www.flickr.com
Related posts:
- 3 Things Anyone Can Do To Improve Their Writing
- How One Wrong Word Can Ruin Your Message
- Isn't it Time to Ungook Your Gobbledy?
- 8 Website Compliments You'd Rather Not Hear
Share This
Post your comment
Comments
-
Hi Kath,
I've never considered how ridiculous "for free" sounds. Thanks for pointing that out. I do get annoyed when people use acronyms incorrectly. One of the common misuses is "ATM machine". It's not an "automatic teller machine machine", is it? ATM is sufficient.
Thanks for what could be the inspiration of another rant.Posted by Sarah Mitchell, 10/06/2010 10:14pm (3 months ago)
-
Hi Aaron,
I totally agree language can be fun to manipulate. One of my tweeps tells me she advertised an event using the word "fantabulous". You know what? That word would make me want to attend. But if you used the word "embiggen" to describe an addition to a home, I wouldn't be so inclined to employ you.
Thanks for stopping by.Posted by Sarah Mitchell, 10/06/2010 9:48pm (3 months ago)
-
although, i must admit, it's fun to throw some of this stuff out there in conversation. trouble is, are you contributing to the dumbingdownness....? "embiggen" is clearly not a word, but one would understand what it means. just as one understands "dumbingdownness". it's a pet peeve of mine as well - but imaginary words can be fun too!
Posted by Aaron Sice, 10/06/2010 9:38pm (3 months ago)
-
OK,
My biggie has to be "for free". It's used all the time in marketing campaigns about getting something "for free".
If "free" has no dollar value, how can you "give" this to receive the free product?
Surely it should be "You get all this free!"
It's like "$XYZ dollars worth of damage".Posted by Kath, 10/06/2010 7:55pm (3 months ago)
-
Hi Sarah. Couldn't agree more. Although Spell Check often isn't enough!
Also thought of 'there' and 'they're' and 'were' and 'where'. They often get misused.Posted by Chloe, 10/06/2010 5:05pm (3 months ago)
-
Hi Jamie,
If it's any consolation, I have very curmudgeonly feelings about those people and businesses that make no effort in their written communications. You've made an excellent point about errors in copy. Everyone is entitled to make a mistake. The very best writers do. It's the blantant and repeated mistakes that set me off. Turning on the spell checker is an easy way to improve the appearance of a quality operation.
The inspiration for this post was the outpouring of comments from word nerds on Twitter. We're everywhere.Posted by Sarah Mitchell, 10/06/2010 2:00pm (3 months ago)
-
Word nerds of the world, unite!
Thanks for letting me indulge my inner curmudgeon (can a woman be a curmudgeon?). I cringe at made-up words, misspellings, and inappropriate usage. It's SO true that I, at least, do judge a person's intelligence by their ability to construct a sentence or two without committing major grammatical faux pas. This isn't to say I'm perfect (I'm NOT - thank goodness for After the Deadline), but I do at least TRY ... which is more than it seems many others bother to do.
;)Posted by Jamie Wallace, 10/06/2010 1:53pm (3 months ago)
-
Hi Chloe,
I totally agree about spelling errors. We're all prone to them from time to time but marketing copy should NEVER have a spelling error in it. When I see something like you described, I instantly put a mental black mark against them. It certainly doesn't provoke me to do business with them. Maybe we should start a "Turn on your spell checker today" day. Thanks for your comment.Posted by Sarah Mitchell, 10/06/2010 4:50am (3 months ago)
-
It is not just poor grammar that really annoys me. I'm also noticing marketing material and online comments with very poor spelling. A brochure I read the other day was explaining that the new product company X has just launched is "hassel free"! There are thousands upon thousands of copies of these brochures that have been distributed across Australia now. How embarrassing.
Posted by Chloe, 10/06/2010 3:03am (3 months ago)
-
Hi Jon,
You make a good point. Stephen Fry was grumbling about this very thing on Twitter earlier in the week. If you can stomach a little modern notation: RT @StephenFry Of all the foolish, ignorant, poxridden, pathetic and tragically misbegotten notions, this one beats them all http://bit.ly/9eXRFB
While I agree with Stephen, it's only really useful if the language advances. I think we have "agreeance" that's not always the case. I suspect that when Chaucer and Shakespeare were alive, everyone sounded pretty much like they did. Again, my point is we must communicate effectively and not offend the sense and sensibilities of people in the process. Now I'm going all "Jane Austen" on you. See what you started?
Thanks for stopping by and entertaining the troops today. It's very much appreciated.Posted by Sarah Mitchell, 10/06/2010 2:35am (3 months ago)
RSS feed for comments on this page | RSS feed for all comments
