Source: Language – Johnson
- least worst option
- To “wait on” instead of “wait for” when you’re not a waiter – once read a friend’s comment about being in a station waiting on a train
- physicality
- Transportation
- gotten
- “I’m good” for “I’m well”.
- Oftentimes
- “Hike” a price.
- Going forward
- “a million and a half” when it is clearly one and a half million
- When people ask for something, I often hear: “Can I get a…”
- “two-time” and “three-time“. Have the words double, triple etc, been totally lost?
- Using 24/7 rather than “24 hours, 7 days a week” or even just plain “all day, every day”
- “deplane“, meaning to disembark an aircraft, used in the phrase “you will be able to deplane momentarily”.
- “It is what it is“.
- “Touch base“
- “leverage“. Pronounced lev-er-ig rather than lee-ver -ig. It seems to pop up in all aspects of work. And its meaning seems to have changed to “value added”.
- Does nobody celebrate a birthday anymore, must we all “turn” 12 or 21 or 40? Even the Duke of Edinburgh was universally described as “turning” 90 last month.
- “Bangs” for a fringe of the hair.
- “A half hour” instead of “half an hour”.
- A “heads up“. For example, as in a business meeting. Lets do a “heads up” on this issue.
- To put a list into alphabetical order is to “alphabetize it“
- People that say “my bad” after a mistake.
- “Normalcy” instead of “normality”
- burglarize
- bi-weekly when fortnightly would suffice
- “alternate” for “alternative”
- “Reach out to” when the correct word is “ask”. For example: “I will reach out to Kevin and let you know if that timing is convenient”. Reach out? Is Kevin stuck in quicksand? Is he teetering on the edge of a cliff? Can’t we just ask him?
- “You do the Math.” Math? It’s MATHS.
- expiration, as in “expiration date”. Whatever happened to expiry?
- “Where’s it at?” This is not more efficient or informative than “where is it?”
- Having an “issue” instead of a “problem”.
- To “medal” instead of to win a medal.
- “I got it for free” is a pet hate. You got it “free” not “for free”. You don’t get something cheap and say you got it “for cheap”
- “Turn that off already“.
- “I could care less” instead of “I couldn’t care less” has to be the worst. Opposite meaning of what they’re trying to say.
Classics
- Faze
- Hospitalize, which really is a vile word
- Wrench for spanner
- Elevator for lift
- Rookies for newcomers, who seem to have flown here via the sports pages.
- Guy, less and less the centrepiece of the ancient British festival of 5 November – or, as it will soon be known, 11/5. Now someone of either gender.
- And, starting to creep in, such horrors as ouster, the process of firing someone, and outage, meaning a power cut. I always read that as outrage.
, as in “it doesn’t faze me”
10 Hot 