Since it's Friday afternoon, here's a bit on language I found interesting. Sorry, can't link since the site (vocabula.com) is not a free one:
A Litter of Clichés
Paul Povse
Charles M. Schultz may have written that "Happiness is a warm puppy," but hearing somebody use puppy as a synonym, for, well, everything, is unhappiness to these ears.
How did the word for something soft and cuddly turn into a generic noun for virtually everything? "Hey, hand me that puppy." "It's time to put a cork in that puppy." "Whew, this dinner party is going to be a bear, time to get this puppy in the oven."
I wonder who was the very first person to use puppy instead of, say, "car keys" or "pot roast." I wonder what the other person thought when he or she heard the word used for an object distinctly noncanine. We all know what a puppy is — four legs, sharp teeth, weak bladder, unequivocal love. Doesn't sound much like a load of laundry to me.
I look forward to the day puppy is toast. Bull's-eye again. Toast was great the first few million times people said it, referring to something that is over and done with, history, finis. But now, toast is, well, stale. How about a campaign to replace toast with, say, cinder?
Here are a few other clichés that we no longer ought to bother with:
• No problem. Every time I hear it, I suspect there actually is one. During a restaurant outing, you're destined to hear no problem several times from the staff. If not, count on good choice.
• Whatever floats your boat. I'm tired of this one because it sounds vaguely obscene, and it reminds me of those smarmy riverboat commercials we hear in this area that tell you you're assured the time of your life on a gambling casino bobbing on some dirty river.
• It's not on my radar screen. This used to be cute, but no more. Its evil twin: flying under the radar.
• Thinking outside the box. Anybody saying this isn't. Actually, I was planning to think outside the box, but I didn't get the memo. OK, one, two, three, there is no memo. Let's shred this cliché, once and for all.
• Awesome. Kids come up with the best, most original expressions, but awesome has lost its awe. And there really hasn't been all that much awesome since Willie Mays, the Beatles, or the first Star Wars movie.
• Hot and hottie. It's time to find a new expression for somebody so good looking that they really float your boat.
• "And then he goes, 'I just can't believe it.' And then she goes, 'Well, I can't believe it either." When was it exactly that "to say" was officially replaced by "to go"?
• It's time to step up to the next level (plate). We have half the sports announcers — and now the athletes — in America to thank for this one.
• Yadda, yadda, yadda. Give it up. Seinfeld is toast.
• Speaking of giving it up, Mr. Emcee or DJ, how about a moratorium on "let's give it up for" and say simply, "Let's applaud?"
• Where the rubber meets the road. This was a good one, in a Detroit-city kind of way, for a long time, but it's now flat.
• Let's all go to the verbal chalkboard and erase, once and for all, crunch the numbers and you do the math. Personally, I've never been able to do the math. That's why I'm writing for a living.
• And then there is that persistent little whatever. My theory is that if we all eliminate whatever — since half of us say it and the other half have to hear it — we'd have six more free leisure hours at our disposal per week. But I haven't done the math.
• A colleague says his son drives him and his wife crazy with like. Example: "So we like went to her house and then she said we should go like somewhere else ..." I fear that every teenager, at some point in the dead of night, is mysteriously fitted with the "like" chip.
I'm on a quixotic crusade here. Just about the time we manage to neuter one cliché, there's bound to be born a whole new litter of these puppies. |
