"This week's new annoying word." Topic

"Stimulative"

Someone needs to have his neologism license revoked.

It is the quite valid adjectival form of the verb "stimulate". What is the problem?

If you take your language lessons from Joe the.. whatever he is these days, you'll be limited to a monosyllabic vocabulary.

Allen

I think "spendulus" is the word of the week.

"Sir Spend-a-lot" is going thru the office a lot recently. Everybody is using it for any big spender…

We've been treated to the word "gustatory" for some reason this week. I'm not sure where that came from.

Joe the Foreign Correspondent?

A LOT of "valid" words are annoying.

LOL Bill! "Spendulus" works for so many reasons…

"gustatory"

I had to look that one up. Gustatory is to taste as phenomenon is to thing. I prefer taste and thing, but use phenomenon when I don't want to look like an idiot.

Aw, John, that's a splenderiffic word! What's the beef?

It's a perfectly cromulent word, John.

We were dealing with the effects of various diseases in class today that you might want to be on the look out for in my profession and gustatory came up but it was next to "smell". I'm not sure why it wasn't next to olfactory.

Then it came up yesterday too. Totally different presenter.

I'm still annoyed with 'wellness' and 'characterful'.

Someone explained to me that in the healthcare field, 'wellness' was a counterpart to 'illness', but I laughed at them rudely and they slunk away when I mentioned that 'well-being' and 'welfare' were actual English words.

'Characterful' is an abomination from the Games Workshop abyss.

I also detest the word "wellness" – it has a real touch of the namby-pamby about it.

But "characterful"? What about a "characterful pub" or "characterful room"? It to me is the nearest English word to that wonderful Dutch word "gezellig" – a mixture of cosy, olde world, charming … not really translatable in English, but "characterful" is close so far as the physical description is concerned, even though it still doesn't have the emotional feel that "gezellig" also conveys.

Looks like you have a percepitus of annoying words.

doubleplusgood

And I hate the term "stakeholder". When I first heard it, I thought I would never use that word. But in the business I am in, it is so ingrained that I find I have to use it in reports and so on – and hate myself for it every time I use the detestable word.

Same with "consultation" … blurgh!

Not new, but very annoying: "Octuplets"

link

CC

My pet hate is 'disconnect' used as a noun. It's jargon I hear all the time in my business.

Not 'to disconnect' something. That's perfectly good English. But rather 'there is a disconnect in this communication'. Urghh.

"Outwith"

A dialect Scottish word meaning 'Outside'. Board of HMRC started using it ("It lies outwith the targets") and soon idiots everywhere were using it as a direct substitute.

So if the person who wrote and asked about "calls outwith our area" in a particulally nauseating way is reading this, I hope your brown-nosing got you nowhere, except for a crappy transfer that the union warned about.

Also "Outlier"

Seems to have crept into American recently. Not even sure how to pronounce it- does it mean most favoured?