{"id":14611,"date":"2014-09-16T07:10:58","date_gmt":"2014-09-16T12:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=14611"},"modified":"2014-09-16T08:05:41","modified_gmt":"2014-09-16T13:05:41","slug":"at-the-peevers-jamboree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=14611","title":{"rendered":"At the Peevers' Jamboree"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alison Flood at Guardian Books extracts a famous author's top linguistic peeves from an interview about how to teach writing (\"Stephen King has named his most hated expressions. What are yours?<\/a>\", 9\/15\/2014),<\/p>\n

The Atlantic\u2019s\u00a0fantastic interview on teaching, writing and reading\u00a0with Stephen King is well worth reading in full. […]\u00a0But perhaps the most interesting part is where teacher and writer Jessica Lahey wrangles out of King what his most irritating phrases of the moment are. […]\u00a0Naming her own most irksome new phrase as \u201con accident\u201d \u2013 and I\u2019m slightly bemused as to how to use this one, so can happily state I\u2019ve not sinned here \u2013 Lahey asked King if he had any additions to this list. <\/span><\/p>\n

King's response was\u00a0rather mild:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2019Some people say\u2019, or \u2018Many believe,\u2019 or \u2018The consensus is\u2019. That kind of lazy attribution makes me want to kick something. Also, IMHO, YOLO, and LOL,\u201d said the novelist.<\/span><\/p>\n

So Flood\u00a0confesses her own sin, identifying her \"own most irritating word\/phrase of the moment: brainchild\", and then gets to the clickbait point, inviting her readers to let their own peeve flags fly:<\/p>\n

I have used it in the past, on a few occasions , and I\u2019m cringing to see it. What a terrible mutant hybrid of a word \u2013 why not just say \u201cidea\u201d? Why does it have to be the child of a brain? I vow, here and now, never to let it darken my keyboard again. \u00a0[…] Comfort me, please, with your own moments of linguistic shame \u2013 and your current most-hated turns of phrase.\"<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is like emptying a sackful of peanuts in front of a flock of pigeons, and the readers predictably oblige, supplying (as of this moment) 2,082 comments,<\/a>\u00a0full of (mock?) rage:<\/p>\n

'To be fair'. You hear this everywhere these days. People seem to think it means the same as 'to be honest'. Argh!!!<\/span><\/p>\n

I had a manager who got into the habit of saying 'on a go-forward basis'. It was all I could do not to stab out my eardrums after about three hours of this.<\/span><\/p>\n

Anybody who writes about always giving 110% (or any more than 100%) is both a liar and an idiot.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"That being said\u2026\" Aaaarrrrgggghhhh.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Just saying\". Especially when I see it used as a hashtag on Twitter. Yes, it is obvious that you're 'just saying', otherwise you wouldn't be er, saying it at all. Bleargh!<\/span><\/p>\n

It's like, so hard to chose. Do you know what I mean? \u00a0Grrrrrrrrrrrr *shakes fist angrily.<\/span><\/p>\n

'took it off of me' 'could of had it' \u00a0and just to prove that I don't have a vendetta against the word 'of' – starting with 'the thing is…' 'a big ask' I could go on but I'd then need to sit in a corner and bang my head repeatedly against the wall<\/span><\/p>\n

In comparison, the previous five\u00a0posts in the Guardian Books Blog got \u00a046 comments (\"September's Reading group: The Bridge by Iain Banks\"), 21 comments (\"How independent should Scottish writing be?\"), 50 comments (\"Ursula K Le Guin, rising above genre and so much else\"), 48 comments (\"Poem of the week: The Sea and the Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins\"), and 8 comments (\"Not the Booker prize shortlist: A long look at The Visitors by Simon Sylvester\"), for an average of 34.6.<\/p>\n

So asking for \"your current most-hated turns of phrase\" brings in two orders of magnitude more reader participation than the Book Blog's usual literary fare. I've noticed this phenomenon before (e.g. \"The social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming<\/a>\", 2\/27\/2007). Being a positive and optimistic sort of person, I'll construe it\u00a0as evidence for the breadth and intensity of popular interest in linguistics.<\/p>\n

Of course, there's more in Jessica Laheys interview (\"How Stephen King Teaches Writing<\/a>\", The Atlantic 9\/9\/2014) than the fragmentary peeves\u00a0that Alison Flood extracted from it. Stan Carey finds the basis for an instructive discussion of what the \"Oxford comma\" is (and is not) — \u00a0\"Oxford commas, Nelson Mandela, and Stephen King<\/a>\", 9\/15\/2014.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alison Flood at Guardian Books extracts a famous author's top linguistic peeves from an interview about how to teach writing (\"Stephen King has named his most hated expressions. What are yours?\", 9\/15\/2014), The Atlantic\u2019s\u00a0fantastic interview on teaching, writing and reading\u00a0with Stephen King is well worth reading in full. […]\u00a0But perhaps the most interesting part is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-peeving"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14611"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14623,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14611\/revisions\/14623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}