(words judged by appearance, sound, or taste, not connotation)
- churlish
- amok
- nth
- flotsam, jetsam (more delightfully specific than “junk”)
- heyday
- curmudgeon, cantankerous, obstreperous, vituperative
- ouch
- Unununium (element 111, symbol Uuu) (I refuse to recognize the name Roentgenium)
- listless, feckless, lackluster, humdrum
- risible, debris
- fathom
- dozen(th)
- catachresis, anathema, recondite; desultory when mispronounced de-SULT-uh-ree
- bibliotics (and “semiotics”, for the same reason)
- the prefix Ur- (though proto- still has a lot of life left in it)
- aegis (but not egis)
- ligature, lipogram, pangram
- hypermnesia
- subtrahend
- interregnum
- errata
- iffy
- milliliter, unneeded
- adroit, adduce
- slapdash, lowbrow, whatnot
- treble, fortississimo (fff), semiminima (a term used in musical notation, apparently)
- ones
- arch (in the sense of mischievous), instrumental (but not in the musical sense)
- ichthyology (likewise “chthonic” and “diphtheria”, but not “diphthong”)
- ampersand (&), eroteme (?), and ecphoneme (!)
- lieutenant pronounced lefftenant
- gag, gag reflex
- exurb, conurbation
- disingenuous, inundate
- favorite oxymoron: “Good morning!”
- runners-up:
- “a little big”
- “pretty ugly”
- “standard deviation”
- “Kansas City, Missouri”
- shellac
- “very last”
- impish
- “Ichabod: the glory has departed” (thanks, Lucian)
- preposterous (for having both pre and post)
(see also postpredicament and prepreparation, which aren’t nearly as pleasing)
- akimbo, excoriate (courtesy of Mike B.)
- thorax, midriff
- favorite Tom Swiftie: “ ”, said Tom blankly.
- unctuous, obdurate
- “Believe you me...” and “You and me both.”
- “You spew nicely.” (the only in-joke here)
- smattering, happenstance
- Cal’s corner:
| | grep |
| | confabulate |
| | Holland (it just looks nice!) |
| | learned (as an adjective) |
| | nonplussed/nonplused |
| | parallel |
| | bugbear |
- pox, jinx, phlox, and HH’s “re-tox”
- brackish, bric-a-brac
- favorite pangram: “Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz” (miles
better than “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”).
- favorite euphemism for being drunk: “open to suggestion” (thanks, Ian)
- lethargic, analgesic
- mountebank, charlatan, ne’er-do-well
- dilettante
- restive
- kindly
- damnable
- undermine, aftermath
- asunder
- solely
- unease, busyness
- skunk, oust, owl
- ambivalent
- any word with four or more vowels in a row:
- queue, queuing, queued
- Hawaiian
- sequoia
- aqueous
- obsequious
- onomatopoeia, pharmacopoeia, prosopopoeia
- Fr. jouaient, (they) had been playing
- even though it’s not a word, “IIII” on clock faces
- (see cheating update)
- beleaguered, woebegotten
- haywire, jam-packed
- pH
- entr’acte, o’clock, definitely not fo’c’s’le
- “squeaks by on a technicality”
- Nicely ambiguous phrase from advertisements: “no interest”
- Nice anagram: TWELVE+ONE = ELEVEN+TWO
- my contribution to the English language, which describes how I feel
most of the time: pregret
- likewise: gung-ho hum
- likewise: stuperb!
- bavardage, bunk, claptrap, hogwash, rubbish, balderdash, folderol
- twelfth
- spend, for spending (“Reduce your software spend”);
ask, for request or question;
solve, for solution;
oppty, for opportunity, especially when spoken
- “Dear Team, ...”
- “semi-colon”, “pre-requisite” for “prerequisite”, “re-occurring” for “recurring”, “ah ha” for “aha”, “can not”
- middleware (Paula M., hitting the nail on the head), peopleware, workflow
- garb, spunk, dub, pink
- formally, when formerly is meant; enormity, when enormousness is meant
- “thanx”; “Ok” (“OK” and “Okay” are okay)
- “i.e.” or “e.g.” used in speech, even if used correctly; “for e.g.”
- flesh(y)
- OOF as an abbreviation for “out of the office”
- dash, when hyphen is meant
- 24/7 (any time I see it in print, I think, “Oh, around 3.4...”)
- millennium spelled with one n; also (brands of car) Mazda Millenia and Mazda Protegé
- dysfunctional
- “At this point in time...” (what’s wrong with “now”?)
- moist, strew
- choir, radio
- ordnance
- verbiage
- aesthete
- skied
- stymie
- cultural (only because for some reason I can’t pronounce it)
- huge pronounced yuge, human pronounced yuman, humor pronounced yumor, and so on
- “Begs the question” when “raises the question” is meant
- milieu, genre, motif
- debuted, crocheted, ricocheted, kidnaped, focused, buses, gases, nonplused
- “Want to come with?” and “That really bugs!” (Happy to report that the latter seems to have vanished.)
- hiccough
- satisfactorily, investigative, caricature, superfluous, mellifluous, hyperbole
- auxiliary, subsidiary
- renege, forfend
- ancient, but I.D., T.V.
- “Have a good one!”, “Check, please” (when meant as a joke)
- latter, when referring to one of more than two items
- anticlimactic
- clientele
- on-premise (vs. on-premises)
- pomegranate, gauge (the spelling of which go against everything I hold dear)
- homage pronounced oh-MAZH
(back in my day, it was pronounced HOMM-ij or OMM-ij)
- ointment
- newsy (no thanks to Steve B.)
- via, “net net”
- “darndest” (you wouldn't say “most darnd”)
- “a ___ or three”
- “at the end of the day...” (11:59 p.m.?)
- ogle pronounced oggle
- blog, newbie, wiki; glom, grok; sneakernet
- anxious, when eager is meant
- renovate, inoculate, desiccate
- premiere, when premier is meant (thanks, Ariana)
- for that matter, premier when premier is meant
- “laxadaisical”
- glut
- slang, splurge
- schwa
- fracas (not objectionable when mispronounced with a short a),
quasi- (ditto)
- vis-à-vis, and (not as bad) tête-à-tête
- ambivalent (har har)
- any pun involving the word pun
- “dub-dub-dub” or “wuh-wuh-wuh” when reading aloud “www”.
(I pronounce it “double-yoos”, which of course applies also to “ww” and “wwww”,
but I can live with that)
- “an e-mail” for “an e-mail message”
- comma-less “hello ____” instead of “hello, ____”
- “There’s a few...”
- enthused
- intestate
- “freer” and “hilly”,
which would be “freeer” and “hillly” in a just world
(and yet “wallless” and “headmistressship” are somehow dissatisfying)
- in that perfect world, “eighteen” would be “eightteen”
- and/or
- papyrus, palimpsest
- “from whence”
- “meds” (for medication(s))
- beribboned, gridiron (long story)
- “sound byte”, as if “sound bite” weren’t bad enough
- “free reign”
- bivouac
- aspic
- quaff
- eclectic (once a good word, now terribly overused)
- isthmus
- cruft, conflate (not so much the words, more that I tend to dislike people who use them)
- anomaly, threshold, absence
(only because I can’t remember how to spell them, when I need to); and anemone, which I would have sworn was anenome
- flotation
- specificity
- tort, flap
- id, torso, robust
- sentences starting Anymore, meaning Nowadays
- oversimplification
- “Case in point”
- “all of the sudden”
- “ek cetera” and—unforgivable—“ect.”
(Also “Etc., etc.” And the rest, and the rest?)
- likewise, typos for à la: ala, a là, ...
- treating “@” as if it meant “around” or “about”, or calling it an ampersand (hear, hear, Andrea)
- Similarly, company logos that look like an at-sign using a letter other than a. Thankfully out of style.
- Telephone numbers using dots (800.555.1212) instead of parentheses and a dash or hyphen.
- in print, letter x for the multiplication sign ×; also arrows made up of hyphens and a greater-than sign: --->
- “ta-da-ta-da-ta-da” accompanied by hand-waving, meaning et cetera;
“yadda yadda yadda” (Thanks, Lara, wherever you are)
- empower, functionality, proactive, utilize, mindshare,
branding (pertaining to brand-name recognition), impact (as a verb), architect (as a verb)
(Paula M. again), timeframe, prioritize, “take it to the next level”, monetize, value proposition, catalyst, and “on the fly” (all of which remind me of meetings);
form factor, marcom (or marcomm, for marketing and communications), “onboarding”, and the dreadful rework.
- win-win, synergy, paradigm (Mike B. again), corner case
- dog-and-pony show, train-the-trainer (thanks, Art; no thanks, Bob)
- “It is what it is”, reticent when reluctant is meant (Art again); “special sauce” (Lori)
- “flushed-out” for “fleshed-out”; “bottoms-up” for “bottom-up”
- “liaise” (an abomination, apparently by back-formation from liaison)
- tasked, termed
- “choosey” (“choosy” isn’t so bad), “storey”, “phoney”
- “soley” (typo for “solely”)
- gubernatorial, pituitary
- ’nother (as in “that’s a whole ’nother thing”)
- mondo (Mike B.), pronto
- muzzle, nuzzle, guzzle (puzzle is okay)
- “equally as well”, “simply put”
- bespoke
- greasy pronounced greezy; schedule pronounced shedule
- “____ much?” (“Stare much?”, “Drive much?”, and so on)
- “...any way, shape, or form.”
- wobble, quibble, kibble, dribble, dabble, bubble, etc.
- “supercede”
- “(tm)” used for “humorous” effect
- “Curiouser and curiouser...”
(unless you’re Lewis Carroll; if you are, I’d like to talk to you about some things)
(Or, “Don’t Make Me Laugh”.)
In the previous list I omitted phrases (and to a lesser degree words) that are beneath
contempt, like “don’t go there”, “military intelligence”, “my bad”,
“____ is the new ____”, or “Are you working hard or hardly working?”
Nearly as bad are all those quotes
from formerly popular books, movies, and television shows: I liked (for example) “Seinfeld” as much as the next person, but
I’ll be damned if I’m going to laugh at “No ___ for you!”—people still reciting this sort of thing should be fined. The dozen persons I’ve seen
plagiarize that “Do Not Make Any Marks on This Booklet” list from The
Journal of Irreproducible Results (you know, the list that reads,
- I salivate at the sight of mittens.
- My father was a good woman.
and so forth) are on the right track: if you’re going to steal jokes, steal them from relatively obscure sources.
See the Be Robert page to learn where my jokes first
appeared, if it wasn’t obvious.
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