Words that always hurt me.

AuthorRundles, Jeff
PositionRundles Wrap-up - Certain words in the language become trite and meaningless

YEARS AGO, MY FRIEND MAGGIE RENNERT, AN ESTIMABLE WRITER whose musings even graced the pages of this magazine more than 20 years ago, complained about the use of the phrase "prior to." Some government hearings were going on at the time, and witnesses were frequently saying "prior to" as they testified--so often that the phrase started showing up in business conversation all the time.

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Maggie, the consummate communicator, would say, "What's wrong with 'before?'"

Her point was that people often used words and phrases they thought made them sound more important, a sort of verbal pretension that Maggie argued was so intoxicating that other people immediately copied it so they could sound more important, too. They weren't more important, of course, and the trend did nothing to further the cause of better communication. It has only gotten worse in the intervening years.

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In the late 1980s someone--probably the author of one of those then-ubiquitous business self-help books--wrote of a "new paradigm," and suddenly paradigms were coming out of every pretentious mouth on earth. There was one Denver civic leader in particular who embraced this cliche to such a degree that, in its silliness, it became a self-fulfilling prophesy: Her board canned her and the company launched a new paradigm with a new leader.

During the middle part of the 1990s it became so popular to sprinkle the phrase "at the end of the day" into every statement made by a public-relations specialist that I thought perhaps the PR professionals' handbook ought to be called "Nightfall." You still can hear "at the end of the day" frequently, so often that when I do hear it I cease hearing anything. I want to grab the speaker and shake some sense into him.

One of the favorite practices of the pretentious is to borrow words from some other, more obscure discipline and apply them in an unrelated context. The one that makes me wince the most is "systemic," as in "Our company is screwed up from top to...

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