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A funny somewhat related to all this: a friend-of-a-friend got tired of all the circumlocutions and sidewords and not-quites and just-plain-dumb words used to "politely" refer to the room where the toilet is kept. So... he started referring to the bathroom as the "Euphemism".
One term that's popped up in the business world over the past few years that grates on me is "speak to", used, for example, in "I can't speak to the legal language in the contract, but I can speak to the technical portion."
How about "speak about"? Where did this come from? I hear it everywhere in meetings, and it's annoying.
It's early in the morning, and I can't think of a lot of good examples for this. It really bugs me when the european form of a word is used in a book. Color/Colour, Catalog/ Catalogue....makes my eye sort of hitch on the page. I understand it's acceptable, I just don't like it.
"Actually, mom, you are misinformed." Really? You're grounded.
Reminds me of the hippie-speak parody: "Like, I mean, you know, right??"
And "actually" is old hat. Now the annoying filler word is "basically."
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Originally Posted by Local1EC
...and I hate it when people describe something with awful grammar.
"He was doing good." (nails on a blackboard)
...instead of doing evil??
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Originally Posted by Local1EC
"It was real dark." (instead of 'really dark') aargh.
Better than fake or imitation dark!! (Especially if it's chocolate! )
Seriously, sometimes there's a subtle difference in meaning, akin to (and probably related to) differences imparted by tone of voice. One would say "and it got real dark" to express an ongoing change or unexpectedness, while one would say "it was really dark" to express either normalcy or astonishment, but in either case not unexpected. (You're astonished when a lightbulb burns out, but you still expect it to be dark afterward.) Note how you also tend to say the two variants differently... that's because they're not truly equivalent, despite the rules of grammar.
A more obvious example:
"I ain't gonna do that" carries overtones of "I refuse" (you can't make me, that's stupid, why would I, do it yourself, etc.) that are absent from the correct but generic "I'm not going to do that".
One term that's popped up in the business world over the past few years that grates on me is "speak to", used, for example, in "I can't speak to the legal language in the contract, but I can speak to the technical portion."
How about "speak about"? Where did this come from? I hear it everywhere in meetings, and it's annoying.
I have a suspicion it's an Anglification of a loanphrase with no exact English equivalent, probably from an Oriental langauge. And it doesn't precisely mean "speak about", as it carries an overtone of "be involved with". It does fill a phrase niche that was previously vacant, or was filled by something like "I can't talk about that because I'm not involved with it and don't know anything about it, but.." -- now this unwieldy circumlocution is shorthanded as "I can't speak to..."
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