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Cliche-watch

  
  

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Kit-Cat Club
08:52 / 19.06.02
If I see or hear the phrase 'hearts and minds' once more I am GOING TO KILL. Latest e.g. (re: proliferating supplementary sections in the Sundays):

'Central to this is the unending battle for the hearts and minds of newspaper readers...'

Grrrrr. What's wrong with good old 'loyalty', for God's sake?

Any other new cliches and truisms I should be looking out for (I need an outlet for rage and invective at the moment) - ?
 
 
Shortfatdyke
08:55 / 19.06.02
come on, kit-cat; it's the world cup - there's just too many cliches to choose from....
 
 
sleazenation
08:59 / 19.06.02
its the dead metaphor society...
 
 
Sax
09:02 / 19.06.02
Phrases along the lines of "he/she has issues..." really arse me off at the moment.
 
 
Margin Walker
09:55 / 19.06.02
My abridged "Shitty, not wittly" list:

"On the same page"
"Pro-active"
"Off the hook"
Adding "izz" inbetween syllables or letters (e.g.: "Hizzoes in tha hizzouse!")
Phonetic substitutions (e.g.: writing "you" as "U", etc.)
"I feel your pain"
 
 
Eloi Tsabaoth
10:48 / 19.06.02
"a sideways look at life"
"drawn into a deadly web of passion/intrigue/lies/secrets etc etc"
These must die now.
 
 
Loomis
10:52 / 19.06.02
How about the poster for the new Keanu Reeves movie?

"In a place where all bets are off he has nothing to lose."

Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrgghhhh! Die! Die now!
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
11:15 / 19.06.02
"In a World where..."
"One Man's fight against..."
 
 
sleazenation
11:19 / 19.06.02
"it was a time for heroes..."

or perhaps more controversially "the war on terrorism" and "the axis of evil"
 
 
Eloi Tsabaoth
11:22 / 19.06.02
Any Dubya speech. That endless mantra of 'bravery and freedom, the freedom to respect others, truth and justice, blah blah blah' Ring the bell and watch the dogs drool...
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
11:55 / 19.06.02
i find pavlovian references to be completely cliche..
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:00 / 19.06.02
"...GONE MAD!!!" (usually, but by no means exclusively, applied to political correctness... although, surely in that case, it would be "gone mentally unwell" or some such...)
Must confess, I use this one a lot myself. But I'm usually taking the piss.

"cop on the edge"?

or if you want total and utter cliche-ridden genius, I refer you to the opening titles of Stephen J Cannell's meisterwerk (and yes, I DO think it was up there with the A-Team), Renegade...

"he was a cop, and good at his job. But he committed the ultimate sin, and testified against other cops gone bad... cops that came to kill him, but got the woman he loved instead. Framed for murder, now he prowls the badlands. An outlaw hunting outlaws. A bounty hunter. A renegade."
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
12:02 / 19.06.02
Elijah, thank you for providing another really minor thing for me to get irritated about... your post should read 'completely cliched' - cliche is the noun, cliched the adjective, and I have lost count of the number of times I have seen this error...

I am pedant, hear me whinge.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
12:03 / 19.06.02
"value added"
"outside the box"
"it's like __________ on acid"
 
 
Ethan Hawke
12:06 / 19.06.02
"Since the dawn of time...."
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
12:06 / 19.06.02
im still trying to figure out what "whinge" is...

actually it should have read cliched, but im so very tired at wrok right now, and when i proof read i generally dont bother moderating unless Haus is around...
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
12:12 / 19.06.02
You all really sound like you should read Junk English by Ken Smith. I think you'd really get a lot out of it...
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:12 / 19.06.02
Another newspaper one- "sleaze" (apologies, sleazenation, I'm sure you don't mean this) meaning "acceptance of money for political favours".
Bah! In my day, sleaze meant snorting ketamine off midget whores, then setting light to the drummer. Who's covered in his own poo. (Whose drummer? ANYONE's drummer, that's who.)

Further proof, if proof be need be (?!) that rock'n'roll is dead.
 
 
Cavatina
12:43 / 19.06.02
Well here's my whinge for today:

'streamline' e.g. 'Vice-chancellor Cliff Blake said that the changes would streamline the university.'

Ha ... cuts, cuts and more cuts.

Other words with that give me the willies include 'outcomes' and 'basically'.
 
 
Ganesh
12:50 / 19.06.02
Hate misappropriation of medical/psychiatric terms. "Schizophrenic" to mean in-two-minds really annoys me, as does the current overuse of "dysfunctional" to denote a perfectly functional set-up which is slightly unconventional (a la Ozzy Osbourne's "dysfunctional family").
 
 
Ierne
12:53 / 19.06.02
"My bad."



I really despise that particular sentence fragment.
 
 
Abigail Blue
13:13 / 19.06.02
It's not really a cliche, but I can't stand it when people use 'momentarily' to mean 'in a moment'. They aren't synonymous (okay, they are, kind of, but only according to the less reputable dictionaries).

I realize that language is a dynamic and ever-changing force (I have this discussion pretty often with various people in my life, and I'm usually screaming at this point), and that this usage is widely accepted, but it isn't right, dammit, and it has to stop.

I also strongly dislike 'bling bling' and all varieties of office-speak, including such gems as 'thinking outside the box', 'putting x on your radar', and any unnecessary abbreviations, eg 'biz caj' instead of 'business casual'. That last one makes me want to eat the head of whoever's just said it...

Pedants unite, Kit-Cat!
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
23:21 / 19.06.02
I despise all economist-speak (which, in some circles, is indeed cliched)- especially the co-opting of the word "goodwill". Securitisation, stagflation, leveraging (LEVERAGING! That's absolute fucking mutilation of language if you ask me.) They all REALLY piss me off.
 
 
Oresa delta 20
23:25 / 19.06.02
"Catalogue of errors"

Perhaps i'm just over-exposed to that one, living as i do in a country where we have another train crash every week...
 
 
Wrecks City-Zen
23:25 / 19.06.02
Troll.

Very cliche around here.
 
 
Ganesh
23:27 / 19.06.02
Aaand that'd be another Ignore, then.
 
 
Wrecks City-Zen
23:29 / 19.06.02
...that'd be another Ignore, then. - Ganesh

Yeah, that is sounding cliche.
 
 
Saint Keggers
04:03 / 20.06.02
It still makes me cringe when people use the term "paradigm"...especially when its soo out of place with the rest of their vernacular and expecially when they pronounce the 'G'.
 
 
Baz Auckland
07:38 / 20.06.02
I think any business buzzwords are horrible. Remember the "information superhighway"?
 
 
captain piss
07:56 / 20.06.02
Any of those business-as-sport phrases like "let's touch base on.." or "...before the close of play" make me reach for an incendiary
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:15 / 20.06.02
It's not really a cliche, but I can't stand it when people use 'momentarily' to mean 'in a moment'.

Or indeed "presently" to mean "at present".

Grrrr.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
12:00 / 20.06.02
"surfing the web" - always hated it, always will
 
 
deja_vroom
15:17 / 20.06.02
Over here, tv divas, pop divas, any famous fucking futile female celebrity receives a "La" in fron of her last name: "La Fischer", "La Montenegro". Ack!
 
 
Elijah, Freelance Rabbi
15:52 / 20.06.02
ha ha ha ha ha
 
 
Saveloy
16:09 / 20.06.02
Cliches? Pah! At the moment I am irritated by everything that everyone says or writes. I'd appreciate it if everyone would just keep their f***ing gobs shut and their fingers away from pens, typewriters and keyboards for a month at least, except to make whichever simple queries (like "can I have a cake, please?") or statements of undeniable fact ("that is the cake I would like") are required for them to physically survive. Anything else is unneccessary guff; if you really f***ing must express something useless such as an opinion (eg "why all cakes should be destroyed, and why all cake eaters are ugly, feeble-minded idiots"), you should go to a dark cupboard and whisper it into a damp cloth. This goes doubly for newspaper columnists and anyone who gets paid to have their opinions published.

Come on, a month of silence isn't too much to ask, is it?
 
  

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