Brits name "most irritating cliches," NL/NL adds its own candidate.

In our discussion of the relevance of direct mail response rates (NL/ NL 2/29/04), we concluded the article with Frank Joseph's observation, "There's only one measurement to consider--dollars at the end of the day."

It turns out that Frank used the London-based Plain English Campaign's choice for the "most irritating cliche in the English language"--"at the end of the day."

It said that "the abused and overused phrase was first in a poll of most annoying cliches."

Second place in the vote was shared by "at this moment in time" and the constant use of "like" as if it were a form of punctuation. "With all due respect" came in fourth.

The Campaign, which describes itself as a 25-year-old "pressure group," surveyed its 5,000 registered supporters in 70 countries.

Spokesman John Lister said overused phrases were a barrier to communication. "When readers or listeners come across these tired expressions, they start tuning out and completely miss the message--assuming there is one! Using these terms in daily business is about as professional as wearing a novelty tie or having a wacky ringtone on your phone."

Lister concluded, "George Orwell's advice from 1946 is still worth following: 'Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.'"

www.plainenglish.co.uk

NL/NL's most annoying phrase

I'm annoyed and irrited by the ubiquitous phrase "address the issue" (and its many variations) for two reasons: its obvious overuse and its lack of real meaning, or specificity.

I ran a search for "address the issue" with two popular search engines. Google came up with 11,400,000 mentions, and Yahoo! yielded 27,600,000 citations.

That sounds like a cliche to me. By comparison, I also searched for mention of another cliche (but one that at least says something), "face the facts."

Google: 4,450,000; Yahoo!: 6,480,000.

Worse yet, "address the issue" doesn't really say anything specific. It's vague.

In his classic 1992 Occasional Paper, "The Press and the Prose," published by the The Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University, the cultural historian and teacher Jacques Barzun wrote:

"Vogue words reduce accuracy in yet another way. By appearing again and again in all sorts of situations they keep better-fitting words out of use. Consider: 'Senator Kennedy ... tried to address the hurdle of his past." What a sentence! Everything these days is addressed instead of being dealt with, discussed, acknowledged, recognized, settled by the court, taken care of, resolved. How much more accurate the report if what actually took place were described by the one term that matches the reality."

RELATED ARTICLE: Avoid these worn out phrases

In addition to the phrases singled out above, the Plain English Campaign received multiple nominations for the following terms--which any careful writer should avoid:

24/7, absolutely, address the issue (hooray for our side!), around (in the place of "about"), awesome, ballpark figure, basically, basis ("on a weekly basis" in place of "weekly" and so on), bear with me, between a rock and a hard place, blue sky (thinking), boggles the mind, bottom line, crack troops, diamond geezer (that's a new one to this American who hasn't been in England for years), epicentre (used incorrectly), glass half full (or half empty), going forward, I hear what you're saying, in terms of, it's not rocket science, literally, move the goal-posts, ongoing, prioritise, pushing the envelope, singing from the same hymn sheet, the fact of the matter is, thinking outside the box, to be honest, to be perfectly honest, touch base, up to (in place of "about"), and value-added (in general use).