Take my money if I use these phrases
There are certain phrases that upset me. I’m sure they upset other people too, but the temptation to use them can be strong.
To help me resist, I offer the following hostage.
If you find me using any of the following phrases for anything but rejection and ridicule, that is a language hygiene violation. If you find a language hygiene violation, contact me by email, and point to the phrase I used and the place I used it. I’ll call that a language hygiene citation. If you’re the first person to point out that use, I’ll send you 10 US dollars, and chalk up a mark, here.
Each set of phrases below has a sell-by date. Yes, there was a time I didn’t have enough courage or energy to avoid these phrases. I’ll try harder from now. When you find a violation, check that it’s after the sell-by date. If you can’t be bothered to do that, just send your citation, and I’ll check the date.
Language hygiene violations
Sell-by date: 2018/08/18
- stakeholder - except when used in the phrase “Vlad the Stakeholder”.
- grant capture - except when used in the sense of a researcher being captured by grants. A researcher is said to be ‘captured’ by grants, when grant income becomes more important to the researcher, than scientific discovery. As in “It will be very difficult for this University to recover from its current levels of grant capture”.
- moving forwards.
- going forwards.
- cross-cutting.
- best practice.
- Importantly, starting a sentence or phrase.
- Crucially, starting a sentence of phrase.
- leverage used a verb.
- including, but not limited to.
- excellence.
- deliverable. Here is a sentence I use to remind me to avoid this word: “Try restricting your diet to beef during the week, and fruit at weekends; you will see some impressive deliverables.”