Sunday, December 30, 2007

two phrases I would like to see dead on the side of the road in 2008

"It's a perfect storm". About anything. I must see that phrase 6 or 7 times a day in the paper, or online.

"This is a wakeup call". And so was that other thing, and so were these 5000 other things.

Used in the same article... the journalist needs to go back to school and learn about "hackneyed, trite and cliche" writing. Often found in the same paragraph, renders the written piece in to unreadable mush.

I had an English teacher when I was a freshman in High School. He happened to also be the football coach. I remember him well.. Mr Marineau... the thing he pounded into our heads all the time, every single time he made us write a paper, was that he despised hackneyed, cliche and trite. And if he found that in a paper, man you could have an A paper otherwise, but if he deemed the paper to have any of that in it, you got an F. He was a great teacher. I hated his guts. He really made us write, though. Made us use our brains instead of hauling out some old tired trick.

3 comments:

  1. At the end of the day, the bottom line is, you're right.

    ReplyDelete
  2. At this point in time, irregardless of the current paradigm, we have a perfect storm and it's a wakeup call.

    ReplyDelete
  3. We're approaching a tipping point on the use of those phrases...which really means there's a long ways to go.

    ReplyDelete