Lovely! Oxford have compiled, whoops! I mean Oxford has compiled a list of the top ten most irritating phrases. Nope, Oxford itself hasn't, unless the memes are coming on thick and strong there; in fact, researchers at Oxford have compiled this list:
The top ten most irritating phrases:
At the end of the day
Fairly unique
I personally
At this moment in time
With all due respect
Absolutely
It's a nightmare
Shouldn't of
24/7
It's not rocket science
This is part of the work that has gone into 'Damp Squib.' We learn that we use language in chunks of words - as one linguist put it, "we know words by the company that they keep." Run all the top ten phrases together and you get a feeling that some chav-football-commentator-sales-manager entity is perhaps desperately sending out a mating call.
Which particular misuse of language gets me hopping mad? Well who cares really? But I'm going to say anyway. It's the fact that so many people: journalists, writers, politicians, (yes, they are all people, despite some rumours to the contrary) are constantly (or, perhaps continually?) saying that they refute things, when they mean that they actually just disagree with what is being said. If you refute something, you have to go ahead and disprove what is being said. As far as I know, if at the beginning of a trial, a defendant is said to refute the charges, then surely there is no need to go ahead with the trial. Doh!
On the other hand, our erratic linguistic behaviours and constantly misplaced and amalgamated meanings are what make life such fun. Personally, I do some of my best thinking in the box.
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