General love: flurry, as in snow; it just conjures a lovely image in my mind. I hear it as if it were a concatenation of "whirling" and "fluffy", and that's what I see; whirling, fluffy snowflakes. I like verbosity because it manages to sound like what it means, and somehow for me it connects with "pompous" as well. Scintillate, along with glitter and glint, seems almost onomatopoeic. Crisp, tinkly, bright words.
General hate: Mundane. I don't like the concept, and it's difficult to say; it seems too heavy because both syllables are accented. I also loathe the British colloquialism snog. An unsexier word is difficult to imagine.
Webspeak love: headdesk. It's somewhat overused, but it makes me titter every time I see it. I love how expressive it is, that blend of futility, frustration, and comic relief. Of course, I have been known to literally perform the action implied by the term - once in front of an entire class at Uni, when a student teacher asked me if anyone had ever told me I looked like Chelsea Clinton.
I have developed a severe allergy to corp-speak. "Synergize" and "leverage" and "best practices" and the like. It's empty language, masking a lack of meaning and substance with a facade of technical precision, like a surgeon operating on a mannequin. Hatey hate hate. |
