Language Log

This question arrived recently by email:

A topic I wonder about: "annoying" words, and the cause of their annoyingness, and whether many people find the same particular words annoying, or if there's a long tail of very few or just one person who finds them annoying.

The broad category is "workplace jargon", but not in the "normal sense" of that ("brown bag lunch", "team player", etc. etc.)

Examples:
– I find the word "remit" (as in: what one is supposed to DO as a job function deliverable) quite, quite irritating. I don't know why. It sounds slightly stodgy, but I like other forms of stodginess.
– I find the word "mandate" equally annoying, when used in the same sense: that which one's job description requires them to do. It means the same thing! Is it because it seems to be a Britishism, while I speak American?

Is it that I dislike the things required of one's job? I really don't think that's it, but maybe my individual experiences with interactions happening upon these "remit" and "mandate" usages are the simple reason for the negative association?

Is there another reason beyond personal priors that I'd find "remit" and "mandate" out of place and annoying in the modern American workplace? Is there a category of words like this? It's more than a simple pet peeve, I think.

I did try web search and LLMing. Consulting an LLM, I find it's not "corporate BS", "pretension, or "weasel words" that bother me. Seems it's some kind of "legalese encroachment" that feels odd. I seem to not mind examples of military or medical encroachments to the same level. It's the authority that's common to them, the LLM says. Yet I don't take too much issue with: caveat, deconflict, fiduciary, jurisdiction, redact, sanction, arbitrate.

I'm going to call them "lightning-pole words", for lack of a better phrase.

‘If This Be Magic’ Review: A Great Feast of Languages
Shakespeare has resonated with audiences in Swedish, Swahili and beyond. But translating the Bard requires some difficult choices.
By Henry Hitchings, WSJ (April 22, 2026)

Transferring Shakespeare's works into another language is hard work:

Samuel Johnson complained, more than 250 years ago, that William Shakespeare’s style was “ungrammatical, perplexed, and obscure.” Many students and theatergoers since have shared that view. Yet even if we agree with Johnson, it has become customary to celebrate instead the playwright’s linguistic resourcefulness and dazzle: his flair for coining words and twisting old ones into new shapes, his taste for double meanings and calculated ambiguity.

The obscurity condemned by Johnson derives in part from Shakespeare’s readiness to draw on vocabulary that would have struck even his contemporaries as bewilderingly nonstandard. Today many of us are as likely to be disorientated by his fondness for folklore and myth, his assumptions about religion and social order, and his immersion in the conventions of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater.

Or does it even have a tail? 

Facebook post by David J. Loftus:

Several commenters on yesterday's post "'Between you and I'", starting with Martin Schwartz, go back and forth (or round and round?) about different from vs. different than vs. different to.

So I can't resist quoting the entry for different from, different than, different to from Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage:

We have about 80 commentators in our files who discourse on the propriety of different than or different to. The amount of comment—thousands and thousands of words—might lead you to believe that there is a very complicated or subtle problem here, but there is not. These three phrases can be very simply explained: different from is the most common and is standard in both British and American usage; different than is standard in American and British usage, especially when a clause follows than, but is more frequent in American; different to is standard in British usage but rare in American usage. 

Ignorant prescriptivist peeving has recently been dying out in English-language mass media, or so it seems to me. But George Will is holding the line, as Viseguy points out in a comment on yesterday's "Vaccination" post. Will's July 30 piece, "Five words that today are gratingly misapplied or worn out", has the sub-head "The massive vibe shift is one of the only big developments in American English. In fact, it’s iconic".

The opening sentence emphasizes both the alleged recency and the U.S.A.'s alleged culpability:

“When we Americans are done with the English language,” wrote Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Let’s survey some recent damage.

It won't surprise our readers that Will's allegations are false, or at least problematic. The five "damages" that he complains about have all been around for several decades at least, if not several centuries, and several of them seem to have started in Britain. In all cases, the Brits need to share the blame (or credit) for spreading the denigrated usages.

Over the years, we've taken many self-appointed usage authorities to task for ignorant pronouncements presenting their personal reactions as facts of the standard language, or even as logical necessities. But everybody has similar reactions, and the point is not to deny the existence of usage conventions, or to pretend that you don't ever perceive something as a violation.  As in all areas of cultural judgment, however, it's a good idea to examine the foundations of your responses, because sometimes it turns out that you're wrong about the facts or the logic.

I recently documented an experience of that general kind in a June 20 post "Incredulous, incredible, whatever…", where a usage that I perceived as a malapropism turned out to go back to Shakespeare.

This morning's example is even more surprising to me — "cut and dry" where I expected "cut and dried".

From Philip Taylor:

Just received this in an e-mail message — sender: American male, born (maybe) early to mid sixties, attended Dartmouth 1984 (or thereabouts) onwards.

Thanks Hilmar. I'll review/install soonly. -k

Seeking clarification, I asked Philip:

The man's name is Hilmar?

What's he going to review/install?

Philip replied:

Hilmar is the name of the addressee (Hilmar Preuße)— the sender was "k", a.k.a. Karl Berry.  "k" is going to review "another set of patches for manual pages".

Just edited a piece mentioning the companies Hays, Schroders and Lloyds. They were named for men called Hay, Schröder and Lloyd but all (I checked) officially lack an apostrophe.

People occasionally throw a fit—illiteracy triumphant!—but it does not seem to have done any harm whatsoever.

— Lane Greene (@lanegreene.bsky.social) November 25, 2024 at 7:03 AM

For the past five years or so, Jeffrey Barg has been writing a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer called "The Angry Grammarian". The last one appeared on February 23 of this year, and Barg moved his peeves to Substack. At about the same time, his musical rom-com premiered at Theatre Exile in Philadelphia.

Linguists are prone to feel that the word "grammarian" should belong to them, not to prescriptivist scolds like the one in Elle Cordova's skit. And we often object even more strongly to "grammar" being used as the justification for condemnation of non-standard spellings, punctuation, word usage, etc., both because of the prescriptivist stance and also because the issues involved belong to aspects of usage (like orthography and lexical semantics) that are not part of what we call grammar.

But the OED's primary definition for grammarian is

An expert or specialist in grammar; a person who studies, writes about, or teaches grammar. Also more generally: an expert in or student of language; a linguist, a philologist; (formerly also) †a person of great learning (obsolete).

Sometimes (esp. from the 17th to early 19th centuries) somewhat depreciative, implying that a person is pedantic, too focused on minutiae, or overly concerned with rules and conventions.

The depreciative sense is illustrated in an 1806 citation from Henry Kirke White:

All that arithmeticians know, Or stiff grammarians quaintly teach.

Yesterday's guest post by Andreas Stolcke, "English influence on German spelling", covered Duden's grudging admission that 's is allowed in certain restricted contexts, and noted the widespread negative reaction attributing this "Deppenapostrophe" (= "idiot's apostrophe") to the malign influence of English.

But Heike Wiese, via Joan Maling, sent a link to Anatol Stefanowitsch, "Apostrophenschutz", Sprachlog 4/26/2007, which offers a very different take.

A relative's new refrigerator magnet:

Most rhetorical devices have classical Greek names, arriving in English through Latin and French: analepsis, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, … But there are some common cases, like personification, where the English word is entirely Latinate, although the Greeks certainly used knew and used the technique. The OED's etymology is "Formed within English, by derivation", and the earliest OED citation is from 1728.