Over-familiarity and abbreviation really annoy people

Fans of this column, if that’s not an oxymoron, will know that last week I decided to start the New Year finding out from people All The Words That Annoy, writes Colm O'Regan

Last week we plunged into the murky world of ‘moist’, ‘gusset’ and ‘discharge’ (punctuation extremely important here.) Now we look at the other categories that get goats.

Over-familiarity and abbreviation seems to be a problem. I have only recently agreed to be addressed as ‘man’ following a protracted legal battle, but there are only so many fights you can fight.

And others feel themselves to be drowning in a wave of crimbos, hollibobs, huns (short for honey, not the tribe who once ravaged a post-Roman Europe), mates and the odd cuz (short for cousin).

They are chafing and biting their tongue when offered veg at a wedding. They look away and gnaw their fist as a lifelong friend mentions their hubby.

Somewhere in a men’s shed sits a man who is delighted his friend got through his heart operations but wishes he wouldn’t call it his ticker. Somewhere an eyelid is twitching after an instance of ‘lovely jubbly’.

I am both offender and offended in this case. I have been for Cheeky Pints but in the last few years I have just gone for pints. We have imported, without any discernment whatsoever, Cheeky Nandos wholesale from the UK. We have pointed at inanimate objects and called them ‘these bad boys’ even if the object in question has absolutely no track record of lovable poor behaviour. It might just be a set of spanners.

And so we come to bullshit. For the sake of asterisk supplies I’ll just call it BS even though that in itself is an annoyingly ineffectual abbreviation. The S takes all the power out of the B. Especially if what you’ve just heard is TOTAL BULLSHIT.

Health and looking after yourself has proven to be a warm and welcoming petri-dish for BS. It’s not that concepts themselves are not benign and important. It’s just that every Tom Dick and Harry is now peddling some form of ‘wellness’, ‘mindfulness’ ‘resilience’ and promising ‘pampering’. We ‘nourish’ every bit of us from our hair to our toenails. It’s just sounds better to nourish rather than feed your bunions.

As for the corporate BS, it’s at plague proportions. It’s difficult to know where to start so after reaching out on Twitter and linking in with a few thought leaders and knowledge champions in the space, the phrases started to flow. Within the service industry, people just want the service and strongly suspect that language is used to hide shite service. I think we’d all like to be passengers rather than ‘guests’. Fine, I’ll be a guest on your train but guests usually don’t have to pay €8 for Pringles.

I’ll get off your plane but I won’t deplane. Last time I checked I wasn’t infested with planes all over my hair and undercarriage.

And you can’t complain or rather action a complaints procedure, no matter how much you feel ‘empowered’ to do so, how ‘passionate’ you are or ‘inspiring’ you will be to others in your ‘cohort’. It might just come down to the fact you don’t have ‘bandwidth’ to ‘start the conversation’.

But you should ‘endeavour’ rather than try. When you endeavour it takes longer whereas if you’re just trying, you will look like you’re not trying hard enough.

The gardaí even come for a bit of criticism. They just can’t win. First it was all the millions of fake breath tests and the corruption. But this time it’s a little bit more ‘innocuous’. It appears they can’t just say the VEHHicle went down the road. It ‘proceeded’.

Seeing as how I’ve about 30 words left, it’s only right I fill them with filler. Sooooo, yeah-no basically everyone was generally, like, furious about how we say it worst when we say nothing at all. Which I thought was ‘awesome’.