List of groaner clichés best avoided, from Washington Post editor

From JIMROMENESKO.COM, an excellent and long list of lazy phrases writers might avoid, courtesy of Washington Post "Outlook" section editor Carlos Lozada.

At first glance, the list begs the question as to why observers, as a society, probe the narrative in that manner. Be that as it may, it is important to note that efforting outside the box provides a palpable sense of relief on this hot-button issue.

There, I said it.

(HT: Jay Rosen)

• [C W]

  for all intents and purposes, it’s a needful article.

  • [chaopoiesis]

    … that’s “intensive purposes”

    • [SamSam]

      … “intensive porpoises.”

      • [toobigtofail]

         ”…in tents of porpoises”

        • [Sean Nelson]

          … “in tents of poor pusses”

        • [chaopoiesis]

          in tents of porpoises
          my grandmother frolics
          shameless and free.

        • [Mister Eppy]

          There once was a porpoise from Green Bay

          Who’s newspaper ran every day

          She lived in a tent

          Where her grandma paid rent

          And instructed her on eschewing Clichés

        • [niktemadur]

          Like the old pun joke that punches with the line …bringing gulls (as in seagulls) across the state lion for immortal porpoises.

• [Kyle Sarrasin]

  I’m not sure if I should keep fighting the appropriation of “begs the question” by modern parlance – seems like trying to hold back the tide with your hands, at this point. Though, c’mon people, it’s a term of art with fixed meaning!

  • [Peter]

    You shouldn’t, you should abandon that fight.  The modern usage makes more sense, and everybody understands what you mean when you say it.   It IS what the phrase now means.   Languages evolve.  Get used to it. 

    • [Kyle Sarrasin]

       That’s akin to saying that any sort of jargon term, if it has a critical mass of people using it, in the same way, improperly, suddenly loses it original and appropriate meaning. I’m unconvinced.

      • [Peter]

        Reality doesn’t have to be convincing, it just has to be reality.  That IS how it works. 

        Now, you can say “Begging the question, in the philosophical sense” if you want to use the original jargon term, but if you use “Begs the question” alone, in conversation, unless you’re referring to the modern usage, you’re pretty much using it wrong.  Edit: Or, let me correct… you may not be using it wrong, you’re using a phrase with an ambiguous meaning that might be decipherable from context. But if you try to correct somebody else who uses the modern usage, then you’re DEFINITELY using it wrong, because you’re ignoring an additional and completely valid meaning of the phrase.

        If I tell you I’m using a computer, will you insist that I must mean I’m using a human being who’s job is to do math, because it originally meant that?   If I say my dinner is awful, do you think that it must be so incredible that it fills me with awe?

        • [thatbob]

          I generally side with you, Peter, in this type of argument over usage, but in the case of “Begging the question” I think that the very sudden, very rapid proliferation of its new meaning might only be a passing fad.  This was a term that I had never heard used once in my life, correctly or incorrectly, for almost 35 years – and then it was in print everywhere all of a sudden, right around the time (come to think of it) that blogging began to supplant established print journalism.

          I know you can’t put the cat back in the bag, or the genie back in the bottle; but if this new meaning proves to be only temporarily fashionable, then there’s no reason that promoting a widespread knowledge of its original meaning could not or should not help to usher in its rapid demise.

        • [cwiley]

          Just use “raises the question” instead. No begging need be involved.

        • [Peter]

          You may not have seen it, but I’ve seen it.  And a quick search on IMDB of the phrase turns up the following (but granted not many uses):

          X-Files (an 1995 episode): I guess this begs the question; if this is an alien autopsy… (where’s the alien is the next line).

          It was also used that way in the 1995 movie “The American President”

          So yeah, maybe it’s relatively recent… but that’s still 17 years ago.  About half my life.  And I’ve personally seen it most of my life used that way conversation, and I’m sure there were more uses in TV and movies, just not particularly quotable lines. 

          (And, I just found subzin.com which also has the following:

          Bull Durham (1988): “Begging the question, what are these boys thinking about?”

          South (1920!!): “for that begs the question, who is taking the film of him?”

          The War of 1812: Causes and Consequences, 1783-1818 (1967): Well, it still begs the question: where the hell is he?

        • [Donald Petersen]

          I’m with cwiley here.  I’m not inclined to alter my habit of reserving “begs the question” for its proper context simply because an increasing number of people, ignorant of its proper use, decide to misuse it in place of “raises the question.”  Language can evolve all it wants, but certain usages do not have to die before I do.

          Same thing when it comes to people like David Haglund who love to defend the misuse of “literally.”  Just because wrongness becomes fashionable doesn’t mean we should embrace it.  Leave it to our illiterate offspring to do that.

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          “Begs the question” is like the good china; what’s the point of storing something that you only use once per year? Liberate it for more frequent use.

        • [Peter]

          Except, Donald Petersen, you’re embracing wrongness by not accepting these new definitions have become the mainstream definition.

          Because this isn’t like debating the mass of a rock, the English language has no objective, measurable existence independent of how people use it… it IS how people use it, and, it seems, we’re using it THIS way now.   You can argue in favor of us not using it that way, but you can’t say we’re wrong for doing so. 

          Unless you manage to convince us to redefine the word ‘wrong’, too.  But then you’re really on our side.

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          Donald Petersen, you’re embracing wrongness

          And consorting with folly!

        • [Donald Petersen]

          Look, Peter, I might sound like a querulous old professor, mired in the hidebound habits of a bygone formal age, but I assure you that that’s not the case.  You might feel encouraged to proclaim that these are the New, Triumphant Definitions Of Today (rather than Tomorrow, or perhaps, The Days Yet To Come), and maybe that’s true in the circles in which you move.  But it’s not like I’m demanding we return to archaic or obsolete usages.  When it comes to the words and phrases we’ve discussed in this thread, the “newfangled” usages (or old misuses) of these terms are only recently being acknowledged as acceptable, simply because so very many people today misuse them, even ones with respectable college degrees and actual measurable readerships.

          And I’m perfectly aware that language and acceptable terminology can change dramatically (or at least noticeably) within a shortish lifetime.  I remember widely-accepted and previously-thought-respectable usages from my not-all-that-long-ago youth, such as Oriental, brontosaur, starfish, sabre-tooth tiger, tubular, stewardess, etc.  These terms were altered or abandoned for various reasons, such as inaccuracy, sexism, inelegance, or what-have-you.

          But the changes in language to which you refer arise from slang, informality, imprecision, and ignorance.  And there’s a reason why we expect a certain amount of popular consensus when it comes to our shared language; that’s why we have dictionaries, and that’s why we don’t just assign any random definition we like to every word we use.  I’ll dust off an old argument I trotted out a couple of weeks ago.
          

          Hey, it’s a free world, more or less. Use your words any way you like. But if you happen to forget the word “green” and you want to evoke the color that results when you mix blue and yellow paint, and you think it might be “red,” so you look up “red” in the dictionary, do you not hope that the dictionary will tell you whether red includes, among its common definitions, that hue acquired when you mix blue and yellow paint? And if it doesn’t, should you just use “red” anyway since it sounds right to you, and you’ll just hope people get what color you mean by your context and voice inflections? And when you tell someone to keep driving forward at the “red” light (by which you mean a green one), and that someone gets themselves killed in a traffic accident, might you not reflect on how you kinda wish you’d listened to Merriam-Webster after all? 

          /hyperbole

          This illustrates the extent to which there can be “wrongness” in language and usage.  You can use words “wrongly” by employing slang, such as using the word “bad” to connote something’s good qualities.  And you can use words in an unorthodox manner, especially when speaking informally or metaphorically or poetically.  Such usages are what make communication so vibrant and delightful.
          But communication fails when words are used “wrongly” to a degree that interferes with understanding.  When someone misuses a word in a manner that someone else understands in the intended context, then the misuse becomes a successful communication.  Enough of these successful misuses eventually stop being misuses, and yes, the language has evolved.

          But I disagree that we’ve reached that point yet when it comes to “begging the question,” “literally,” and “disinterested.”  Right now, the majority of appearances of those terms before my eyes are proper usages, though the tide does seem to be turning.  I disagree that the “mainstream definition” of those terms has changed yet.  And to this very day, the instances I see where these terms get misused are usually at the hands (or lips) of the young and unsophisticated.  And I know this is an awfully elitist attitude for me to hold (particularly since I hold no academic credential fancier than my high school diploma), and it would be pretty easy to discount my opinions solely based upon my propensity to crassly split infinitives and to stick seventeen parenthetical remarks into every paragraph, but I suspect I’ll be an unbowed prescriptivist until they nail me into a box.

        • [Donald Petersen]

          “Begs the question” is like the good china; what’s the point of storing something that you only use once per year?

          Some people use the good china once a year, some use it every Sunday, some only eat off paper plates.  I own a compression gauge that I haven’t stuck into a spark plug hole in probably eighteen months; does that mean I have no need for one, and should just stick my finger in the hole to measure cylinder compression?  My vocabulary is much like my literal toolbox.  I add to it as need be, neglect to maintain it at my peril, and ever-so-rarely discard tools I know I’ll never have occasion to use.  (I’m a packrat, so what?)  I’m not that much of a purist.  I’ll use a 13mm wrench in place of a 1/2 inch one if I have to (or even if the 1/2 inch one is a couple of uncomfortable inches beyond my reach in some circumstances), and I’m liable to fall back on the 70s trailer-park patois of my youth in most conversations rather than adhere too closely to Betty Windsor’s English, but I’m still not about to use a screwdriver as a chisel (or vice versa), nor am I willing to deliberately use a specialized term for a purpose for which I deem it ill-suited.

      • [semiotix]

        People are not remotely radioactive enough for the term “critical mass” to have any meaning when applied to them! Stop misusing our physics jargon!

      • [DewiMorgan]

        That’s akin to saying “if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”

        The original jargon use still exists. An alternative use may also evolve. Both may exist at the same time.

        This has happened with “moot point”, which, in common use means a point rendered academic and pointless to discuss further; and in council worker jargon, means a debatable, undecided and potentially important point. Both are valid senses of the term. To a council worker, a point to raise at a moot is an important issue. To a normal person, a point that could only be decided at a moot is irrelevant to everyday discussion.

        Similar changes of use can be seen in terms like “shock”, “chronic”, and so forth.

        Here’s where a good place to go if you want to get het up about this kind of thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_disputed_usage

        But personally, I advocate taking a joy in language, its variations and development.

        • [Kyle Sarrasin]

           We didn’t evolve from monkeys. We share a common ancestor, which has since left the field.

        • [C W]

          MEANING EVOLVES, OK!?!

        • [Mister Eppy]

          “It’s like a cow’s opinion.  It’s ‘moo’”

          - Joey Tribiani

        • [Jon Rodriguez]

          Agreed, but if I have to hear “mute point” one more time…

        • [Donald Petersen]

          See, that’s how these things get started.  People adopt misheard or misunderstood phrases, the effect spreads, and suddenly “language evolves” more as a result of carelessness and ignorance rather than through art and sophistication.

          If enough people use “disinterested” as a synonym for “uninterested” so that the unique legal definition of “disinterest” exists only in the heads of antique powdered-wig lawyers, then that’s a net loss for the language.  ”Literally” is prevented from succumbing to the fate of “really” as being merely an intensifier of metaphor rather than being used solely in cases where it’s important that a phrase not be mistaken for a hyperbolic metaphor, simply because there’s really (even “actually”) no alternative word to get that point across nearly as well as “literally” does.  Similarly, if “disinterested” is usually used to denote a lack of curiosity or conscious interest, as opposed to a lack of financial or partisan interest (or otherwise “having a dog in the fight” of some sort), then what word would we adopt to succinctly show that an arbiter (for example) is sufficiently neutral because she doesn’t benefit in any way if one party wins the dispute over another?

          If one says that something begs the question of something else, sure, we have another way of saying so by utilizing a construction that refers to circular reasoning.  But right now the correct usage of “begs the question” is proper and specific, so why should the educated writer abandon it to the unlettered nincompoops who happily try on every ten-dollar phrase they come across without paying for it by learning what it actually means?  If people would really try to use language with a degree of care and precision and–heaven help us–art, then misunderstandings will become rarer, useful (if somewhat esoteric) usages will be preserved for their special-occasion use (like Grandma’s fine china), and the evolution of our language might proceed in a guided, cultivated fashion, rather than as haphazard, dystopic chaos.

        • [Antinous / Moderator]

          Where do you draw the line? Are mice still “deer”? Is bread “meat”? Is a pork chop “venison”? And can you pick up “pineapples” under the trees in the park?

        • [Donald Petersen]

          Now, I never said or implied that language should be static and never-changing.  The idea that Shakespeare coined over a thousand new words, phrases, and metaphors is a good argument that the language can change for the better overnight.

          I just personally like to think that where we can help it, it might be nice to encourage thoughtful and elegant evolution in our language, rather than leaving it to the meddlings of the barbarian hordes.

          I’m no line-drawer.  The language wasn’t particularly richer when I started using it than it has become today, so I don’t insist we cling to the language of the 70s Because I Say So, or Because That Was The Pinnacle Of The English Language.  That would be missing the point anyway.

      • [zikman]

        It’s times like this that I consult a dictionary… http://i.imgur.com/TqwvvkP.png

    • [C W]

      “Languages evolve. Get used to it. ”

      It’ll never stop sounding stupid.

  • [chaopoiesis]

    Brother, can you spare a question?

• [Neowolf]

  I avoid cliches like the plague.

  • [Samuel Valentine]

    I just try to avoid the plague.

    • [Kyle Sarrasin]

       Don’t visit West Virginia.

  • [GregS]

    When all is said and done, I like to think outside the box, to take the road less traveled, to march to the beat of my own drummer, and for those reasons I leave no stone unturned, and no avenue unexplored in my relentless quest to avoid cliches like the plague.

• [mack]

  At the end of the day, this is a win-win situation!

• [Peter]

  This newspaper seems to be writing a lot more about telekinesis than I would have expected.   

• [James Agenbroad]

  OTOH the style section seems to have a strange affinity for the word “palimpsest”

  • [Gilbert Wham]

     Who doesn’t?

  • [Quiet Wyatt]

    ‘Strewth they needs must bid their amanuenses henceforth to eschew such antiquated terminology.

    • [niktemadur]

      Oh I’d love to add a witty reply using the phrase “Stalin wasn’t stallin” somewhere in there, but all I can think about is that Stalingrad is still a Soviet town.

      Then dear old Bob’s quote about how if there was a mile-long cigarette that was lit when he woke up, he’d puff on it until bedtime, then poor little Alfie is unable to sleep, just like me.

• [peregrinus]

  I’d figured the papers no longer had proper writers except in the editorial columns!  I thought they had apps where you selected the major topic, input  names, selected the section of the paper it’s going into, then the database would plumb its depths for aphorisms and catchphrases, like some grinning idiot memory master.

• [Navin_Johnson]

  Scarred by war

  At least 27 pro Iraq War editorials leading up to the invasion, and strangely sheepish and quiet here at the 10 year anniversary. I see why they might want to avoid such words.

• [jsd]

  “Some say” as in:

  “Traffic studies have show bike lanes to have a calming effect on local automobile speeds, though some say the lanes are responsible for all the war and death in the world.”

  -Every local news report ever

  • [GregS]

    By “some say” you mean Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, right?

• [Jorpho]

  Phooey, I like Ironic Capitalization.  And sometimes it seems like there is no substitute for a nice “not-un-” construct.  Maybe “not entirely un-” might yet be not unforbidden?

  But I don’t see “There’s something about” in the list.  Just plain wishy-washy, that.

  • [Donald Petersen]

    I like Ironic Capitalization, but not to “Imply Unimportance Of Things Others Consider Important.”  I use it like A.A. Milne, to imply the importance of what I consider important.

    And that’s a Very Important Distinction.

• [Ernest Valdemar]

  Contrary to what ideologues will tell you, the mainstream media doesn’t have a political bias. It has a “lazy and facile storytelling” bias.  Getting rid of cliches is necessary, but not sufficient.

• [Dlo Burns]

  The cliche that drives me up the wall (especially if a movie is coming out) is “ZIFF! BAM! POW! Comic books aren’t just for children anymore!”

  • [Ernest Valdemar]

    cf “Big bands are coming back!”

    Edited to add: Back in the 70s, I had really geeky taste in music, and when my older sister’s hippie boyfriend asked me what kind of music I like, I said, “Big band.” And he responded, “You mean like ELO?”

    Fast forward to the late 90s, when the media went nuts over Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Lindy clubs.

• [Hanglyman]

  Why do so many of them involve telekinesis?

• [Brainspore]

  This certainly raises new and troubling questions about journalistic practices.

  • [toobigtofail]

     …in addition to the old and troubling questions…

    • [Brainspore]

      Or you could do what Malcolm Gladwell did and move on to “perverse and often baffling.”

• [nominuspublius]

  I say we should unshackle “begs the question” from the old usage anyway.  It is either a terrible translation or it was an improper application to begin with.  If they’re referring to petitio principii, just use the term “assumption from the beginning” (which is the literal translation from Latin), or call it “circular reasoning” (which is what it really is).  Let everyone use the term “begs the question” in the everyday application that makes more sense than saving it for a logical fallacy term.

  • [C W]

    Why celebrate ignorance?

• [wjcarpenter]

  Such lists are generally just plain stupid. They try to make the point that a lot of phrases are used meaninglessly, but they end up listing lots of things that do convey actual meaning. They just happen to be used a lot. Get over it. Not ever piece of writing needs to sound like F. Scott Fitzgerald. The fact that something is used a lot does not make it meaningless. Is someone going to rail against using the same tired old pair of definite articles?

• [franko]

  i am pro-cliché and i vote.

• [smut clyde]

  They certainly threw those cliches under the bus. There was a firestorm of controversy about some of them, though.

• [Matthew Miller]

  Useful to know that “TK” is the copyeditor’s version of foo and bar — a placeholder for a name to be filled in later. 

  • [phuzz]

     Apparently it stands for “To Come”:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_come_%28publishing%29

• [Steve Taylor]

  You forgot to say “spiral”. No bad journalism is complete without something spiraling, whether it’s up or down.

• [Brianne Archer]

  On the other hand, I encourage my SAT students to study cliches and use them sporadically in their essays. It proves to the readers that they are fairly well-read and they show up in the sentence completions quite frequently.

• [curiousrobot]

  If we accept “begging the question” to mean “raising the question,” is it long before we must accept “I could care less” to mean “I don’t care?”

  Is that really what we want? I shudder to think…

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    False equivalence. Beg and ask are synonyms, so it’s a perfectly reasonable use of that phrase. “I could care less” can’t be construed to mean “I don’t care”.

    • [cwiley]

      “Beg” may be a synonym of “Ask.” But here is the heart of the matter: words — even synonyms — may have different shades of meaning, which is why one might use one word in lieu of another. Beg implies something more than ask, so use the word “beg” when it’s really what you want to be understood. If you ask me, you’re panhandling for an answer you’ve already decided to be true.

      http://begthequestion.info

    • [C W]

      “Beg and ask are synonyms”

      Every synonym is not a synonym in every context, though.