Comments on: Worthy words and banished words

By: Kerry

Kerry — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:28:04 +0000

I concur with my mum!

By: Priscilla

Priscilla — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:13:28 +0000

I’m with Colleen in nominating “impact/impacted.” I hate “impact/impacted” used as a verb. I’m an editor by profession, and I always change my authors’ “impacts” to “affects” or something similar.

I’m with you on “utilize,” too.

By: Fawn

Fawn — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:58:53 +0000

I think the “utilize” thing is the one rule that REALLY stuck with me when I read Strunk & White’s Elements of Style years ago. It’s been a pet peeve ever since, which got me into one of the very rare arguments I had with my best girlfriend in university. Her argument was that her mom was an English major and used the word “utilize”.

However, they also had an issue with the word “moisturize” (for skin cream ads) preferring “moisten”, which goes to show they were both men. I think it was a new-ish word at the time the book was written, but growing up with the word, I’d say “moisturize” is to replenish the skin’s moisture content from the inside, while “moisten” would mean taking a damp face-cloth to one’s skin. And I’m only going into this lengthy comment because when I was thinking that one through, it made me laugh to think about “moisturizing” one’s garden. LOL

By: Ingrid

Ingrid — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:32:43 +0000

For me it’s “pick up”. I think that means to lift up, but some people use it to say “buy”. I guess that shows that English is not my mother tongue.

By: colleen

colleen — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:25:06 +0000

That should read incorrect.

By: colleen

colleen — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:23:04 +0000

I would ban the incprrect use of “impact/inpacted”. It drives me crazy. Whatever happened to affected?

By: alison

alison — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:06:16 +0000

Have I given you my anti “signage” rant yet? There’s a perfectly good word for more than one sign. It’s ‘signs’. Oh, and the radio commercials for a lottery that announce “Over 1 million dollars in prizing”. Prizing? As a noun? And that’s not even getting into ‘over’ instead of ‘more than’.

And I’m kinda tired of ‘shovel-ready’ in the budget/economic stimulus stories on the news. As for corporate-speak, I could live very happily if I never heard ‘leverage the knowledge base’ and ‘stakeholders’ again.

By: kgirl

kgirl — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:28:17 +0000

I’d be happy to never hear the words, ‘going forward’ again.

‘MummyIpoopedcomewipeme’ I’d also be ok with not hearing.