Friday, May 14, 2010

Words and phrases to avoid

This little blog keeps track of them. The blog is called Don't Say Industry, which is how each entry is phrased. These are my favorites:

Don’t say “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.

Don’t say “log on to our website”.

Don’t say “orientated”.
Here are a couple of my own suggestions that I'd like to see banned:
"cool beans"

"pulling the plug on Granny"

4 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

Pulling the cool beans on granny!

Meade said...

It was all good until someone orientated granny and the cool beans in a bad dance about architecture.

Richard Lawrence Cohen said...

"luminous" -- if not describing something that physically emits a glow
"astonishing" -- if describing something that's mildly surprising
"incredible," "unbelievable" -- if not describing something that defies credence
"perfect storm" -- if describing something that occurs indoors
"laundry list" (of complaints, reasons, factors, etc.) -- if does not involve the washing of clothes
"on the same page" -- not even if describing two printed items found on one sheet of paper

Beth said...

We were just talking about "log onto our website" recently. Clients frequently want that on their sites, and my partner has to patiently refuse.

Orientate bothers me, but I believe it's standard in Britain. Is it an elaborate way to avoid accidental Orientalism?