Please don’t think I’m here to complain about rizz or skibidi toilet etc. Thats all fine by me.
The term I dislike strongly is ‘eeeh’ before you make a statement disagreeing with someone. (This is over text only). Now maybe I’ve been pavloved bc it’s always used by someone disagreeing. But I’m happy with people disagreeing with me normally its just the ‘eeeh’ or ‘erm’ that annoys me.
So what’s a random term that annoys you?
PS. Saying “eeeh actually ‘eeh’ is a perfectly fine term” would be a ridiculously easy joke and I will judge you for making it. And I know atleast one person will. Especially bow that I’ve said all this.
“Not me” doing something.
Just say you’re doing something, and accept that it may be a bit hypocritical or shameful that you’re doing it.
But that is them accepting it.
The question was “what word or phrase annoys you,” not “do you understand this phrase.”
I know what the phrasing means, it still bugs the shit out of me.
I unreasonably hate the word “moreover”. I see no reason why you wouldn’t use the words “also”, “additionally”, or even “furthermore” that sound way better when read.
You would have hated my highschool essays
I cringe so hard at the twitterist carebear-hugbox way of smugly claiming the intellectual high ground and shaming somebody:
“Be better.” or “Do better.”
The sentiment isn’t terrible, but it’s prevalent use is obviously just dripping with arrogance and thrown out in the most petty ways. Ugh!
They’re the same types that appear in comment threads with contradictory arguments to literally fucking anything -
“We should save the whales”
“Yes but my cousin got splashed by a whale on a boat trip as a toddler and now has a terrible phobia that makes her wheeze whenever she sees one. Do you want that, is that what you want?”
“We should plan walkable cities”
“OH MY GOD SHES IN A WHEELCHAIR TOO DO YOU ONLY EVER THINK ABOUT YOURSELF YOU ABLEIST”
😂
My theory is that they’re just unbelievably bo-o-o-o-oring, humourless people with nothing to add to a conversation but a desperate need for attention
The wheelchair one (whilst obvious hyperbole) is a great example of why this rhetoric isn’t useful.
Often people who say we should plan walkable cities don’t consider what that would mean for wheelchair users and other disabled people, because they don’t have the lived experience to think along those lines. So it would actually be super useful if someone could say “okay, but what about wheelchair users?” in a constructive way, because there are additional considerations re: pedestrianisation and public transport. Disabled people are way too often treated like an inconvenience or obstacles to progress, and that’s fucking exhausting, so it’s useful to have allies who ask “hey, what about disabled people tho”
The people your comment is about don’t do this. As you highlight, they make things about themselves, and if anything, this makes it harder to have productive conversations about what a ‘walkable city’ for everyone would look like. I suspect that for many of these people, it’s based on a nugget of good intentions inside a blob of insecurity and dread at the state of the world; they feel like they’re not doing enough so they resort to very loudly virtue signalling in the most bizarre ways.
See?
The “whilst obvious hyperbole” bit is the clue. The two situations/comments/opinions are just examples, never happened and never will
It wouldn’t have mattered what examples I’d made up, someone like you would come along and go “wELL aKShULLy”
Fucksake!
My dude, I’m agreeing with you
Edit: effectively I was saying that I agree with you that there seems to be a particular kind of person who is overly contrarian, very loud and impossible to have productive discussions with.
I felt like the wheelchair example you picked was a great example of how this happens “in the wild”. I wanted to build on your comment by using that example to elaborate on how these contrarian types cause harm, even if they might seem to be concerned and well-intentioned. I found the wheelchair example to be a good one because it is actually something that I’ve seen happen multiple times.
I feel that your reply is an unfair characterisation of my comment. Given how the internet’s communication norms can prime us to read and respond to things in an overly adversarial manner (especially as it’s clear from your original comment that you’ve got way too much experience with silly argumentative types, so I sympathise), I am hoping that your response was based on a misinterpretation of my comment and/or me being insufficiently clear in what I originally wrote (apologies if so).
“We should plan walkable cities”
“OH MY GOD SHES IN A WHEELCHAIR TOO DO YOU ONLY EVER THINK ABOUT YOURSELF YOU ABLEIST”I don’t understand this one? Walkable cities are better for wheelchair users.
Sometimes, a settler needs for shaming.
Queer. Not all gay men (the one group I can safely speak about) like to be associated with an ex-slur and its connotations.
I am someone who really likes the term for myself, because it can encompass a whole bunch of complex identities across gender and sexuality. It feels like it simplifies things for me, and has helped me to properly understand the necessity of LGBTQ solidarity. There have been times when I have been told it’s inappropriate for me to personally identify as queer because some people find the term offensive, which I find absurd because such a large and heterogeneous community will never be unanimous on what terms or labels to use.
However, much more frequently than that, I have seen people being insensitive to the reality that there are a ton of people who have pretty legitimate beef with the term and who don’t want it applied to them. I’m talking about situations like “queer folk like us <gestures at the entire room>” or “the queer community”. It’s a pretty reasonable request if someone says “hey, if you’re referring to a group that involves me, I’d prefer you not use queer as a blanket term”. The appropriate response to that is “I’m sorry, my bad”, but I have seen way too many people start arguments that actually the (usually but certainly not always) older gay men are obstacles to Progress.
I like the way that a friend of mine framed it when he said that he’s actively jazzed to see a word that did such harm being reclaimed by a new generation who are finding great power and solidarity in it. But that’s never going to erase the sting he still feels when remembering being victimised for years by people who’d shout that word. “You can’t reclaim a slur if you ignore all its history and disown the members of your community who experienced it as a slur”.
It boggles my mind that there are people who are heavy advocates of the power of self determination of one’s identity, but who don’t see the issue in forcing the label of “queer” onto individuals who have expressly rejected it.
I’ve always thought queer had 2 connotations. The first being the slur. The second is a catch all for someone not lgbt or someone who doesn’t know what they are yet.
Agreed!
But there’s also a certain expectation of “flamboyance” from the gay community, or you’re “not gay enough” and I think a lot of self-identifying queer peeps are to blame.
On top of the poor history of the word, I just don’t want to be associated with colourfulness and energy because that’s simply not who I am. People from outside looking into LGBTQ+ assume that that’s who gay men need to be because of media representation… It makes me tired.
But there’s also a certain expectation of “flamboyance” from the gay community, or you’re “not gay enough” and I think a lot of self-identifying queer peeps are to blame.
I feel this is due to a noticeably high level of what I’ve come to call “the ladder-puller generation” among gay folk. Y’know, the white faux-upper-class guys or girls who got the white collar job, do everything in their power to maintain a pristine aura of political ‘good-one-ness’ even when it means throwing their disadvantaged supposed-kin under the nearest bus. The ones who pulled up the ladders behind them as soon as they got to ‘routine brunch-goer’ level. I put it on them, and the compatibles that just welcome cops and corporations into Pride when it was supposed to be a riot against those forces.
If someone isn’t loudly and proudly out around me, if someone goes to bat for rainbow-washers that shuck and jive for thirty days just to pump extra profit, then I automatically assume they’re a ladder-puller that would sell me out to whoever for whatever if it meant they could get a little bit further in the cosplay-cishettry that is their life; because sometimes, it’s the ladder-puller gays that are more dangerous to us than the cishet settlers.
tl;dr, they might fuck like us, but they not like us; and it’d take a near-government level background check for me to trust someone like that. From where I sit, the ladder-pullers, the pristine-optics gays? They let all of our artists, our creators, and the gays actually worth knowing die to AIDS, 'cause it’d have been icky to cede them help. That’s why I don’t trust the optics-bothers. Because the optics-bothers and ladder-pullers were the only ones to make it out.
“It is what it is”
I get the sentiment behind it, it’s just usually so defeatist/dismissive of a situation to me.
That’s now how people in my subculture use it.
They use it to mean “it’s too late to avoid this problem; let’s talk about things we can change at this point”.
Example:
“If you hadn’t stopped at that rest area the killer never would have slashed our tires”
“Well if you hadn’t jumped for those cheap tires maybe he wouldn’t have been able to slash them with a butter knife”
“And if you’d paid for the triple A we’d have a ride by now”
“Look, it is what it is. Let’s just figure out a way to get back to town without having to follow the road”
Don’t leave us hanging! Finish the story! Please let the person that said “it is what it is” die a gruesome, dark, and slow death. But not me because I didn’t really say it… I was quoting, and that doesn’t count.
I’m currently going through a pretty bad divorce where my wife cheated on me, drained my accounts, lawyered up and send a letter demanding $280,000 and isn’t signing documents or responding to her legal council.
I’d love to get it all finalised and end that chapter of my life but realistically I can’t force her to do anything. I can’t make her sign documents, I can’t make her talk to her lawyer. So ultimately it is what it is.
Frankly, that saying has (since our separation) become an anthem to me. I can understand why you’d think it’s defeatism etc if it’s someone speaking of something they can legitimately do something about but truely sometimes it really is what it is.
Starting every sentence with “So”. “So” being the way to indicate the beginning of a sentence.
I do this too much. My defence is that I am a bad writer who’s working to be better.
Can I suggest joining “the Toastmasters” https://www.toastmasters.org/ . I found it very educational. I learned that was rushing to fill the “dead air” before I had fully formed my thought (read:sentence).
All my "um"s and "er"s disappeared. You will be fine.
Thanks for the recommendation, I’m always glad to discover new resources. I’m also forever cursing the fact that science degrees don’t put more emphasis on writing and speaking well.
I hear that! Toastmasters was part of my conversation long after it would have been helpful!
Good luck.
Coffe-shop barista voice.
You all know what I mean: that 'I’m trying to make my voice croak but can’t manage it." intonation.
I have no idea what you mean
They think I’m Mexican
Maybe this helps: https://youtu.be/WDfJn1kcQuU
Huh. I’ve never noticed that before
I hate this too.
you can’t just say Perchance
Perchance is a great word though. I think I’d probably use it if I knew how to do so appropriately in a sentence (though I imagine only a fraction of people who do use that word use it properly. That tends to be the case with formal or archaic words used in informal contexts)
When people say ‘like’ constantly between sentences or sentence fragments or before every adjective.
And (they) still can’t understand similes.
“At the end of the day…”
At the end of the day, it is night
People using double negatives incorrectly. Like “I didn’t do nothing!”
I’m afraid to say I kind of like that, although don’t particularly use it much.
I didn’t do no nothing wrong now, didn’t I?
You don’t deserve your existence
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I ain’t talkin to nobody without my lawyer!
OK yeah
“Live. Laugh. Love.” or similar.
So just like L words?
Maybe it hasn’t crossed over the pond yet.
It’s a sign usually deployed by left-over women as a kind of personal motto.
It always strikes me as a kind of display of personal conciliation. And then the next thought that occurs is “So what: it is not my concern.”.
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balls
Using the phrase “serious question” or “honest question” will make me immediately assume your question is the exact opposite of that. Probably I’m overreacting, but expecting that anyone might respect that declaration you’ve made about your own question, that gives me narcissist vibes.
Sometimes it’s meant like “I’m about to ask what might sound like a dumb question, but I’m genuinely asking, so please take me seriously.”
Or questions that sound like they’re rhetorical, or being asked for provocation’s sake, but are being asked in good faith.
Source: I say ‘honest question’ a lot, and not as a rhetorical device - I just want real answers to questions that might be dumb/asked dishonestly (e.g. as put-downs) in other contexts.
Sometimes it’s meant like “I’m about to ask what might sound like a dumb question, but I’m genuinely asking, so please take me seriously.”
Trump, Zuckerberg, Musk, Gates…
Kevin Gates?
Do you often look out your window and see everything you dream about and wish you had?
