Monday
Jun062011
06 June 2011Words we don't say
;)
I found this list on the Made Shop's lovely tumblr, originally posted by Hugo Lindgren on the New York Times. Lindgren explains:
In 1997, when I was first hired at New York magazine, Kurt Andersen, now a best-selling novelist and radio-show host, had just been fired as editor. Everybody was grieving about this, though not me, since I wouldn’t have had a job there otherwise. And though it wasn’t until years later that I even met Kurt, he unwittingly left me a gift: tacked to the bulletin board in the office I took over was a single page titled “Words We Don’t Say.” It contained, as you might surmise, words and phrases that Kurt found annoying and didn’t want used in his magazine. Just yesterday, I rescued it from a bunch of old office stuff that I was throwing out, and I have to say, 14 years later, it’s still a pretty useful list of phony-baloney vocabulary that editors are well-advised to excise from stories.
I think I need one of these. There are many, many words I use far too often in my writing (I type "splendid" at least a dozen times a day), and tired, tabloidy phrases that get repeated over and over. There's a fine line between having a distinctive voice and having a hackneyed one. It's important to constantly exercise one's vocabulary muscle.
Reader Comments (5)
Hear hear (oops!) I try to re-read my writing to eliminate any cliches and overused words. The above could be a contents page of some of the women's mags in the UK (bloody awful).
I bloody hate 'helmed' to describe directors making films. Empire magazine are very guilty of this. It's not a ship, it's a film.
"Helmed" is bad enough, but it's the derived term "helmer" for director that really riles me. It sounds like some sort of sexual pervert...
It's a small step from 'helmer' to 'rim-jobber'. Was that uncalled for? Probably.
Nearly every WIRED article mentions the Turing test. Does my bloody nut in. I hate that magazine.