b3ta.com qotw
You are not logged in. Login or Signup
Home » Question of the Week » Annoying words and phrases » Post 690661 | Search
This is a question Annoying words and phrases

Marketing bollocks, buzzword bingo, or your mum saying "fudge" when she really wants to swear like a trooper. Let's ride the hockey stick curve of this top hat product, solutioneers.

Thanks to simbosan for the idea

(, Thu 8 Apr 2010, 13:13)
Pages: Latest, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, ... 1

« Go Back

fish and chips
this is something i do which, while not directly annoying, is probably very annoying to anyone who has to work out what i mean. you see, i'm a scatterbrained sort of fish, and my vocabulary has run into clumps in some areas. to be specific, anything that you might buy from a fish and chip shop is called fish and chips. ANYTHING. even if it's sausage and chips, roe and chips, or a pickled egg. sometimes it gets generalised to all takeaways: "i fancy fish and chips." "what sort?" "chicken chow mein." so yeah, sorry to anyone who's had to do the takeaway thing with me
(, Sat 10 Apr 2010, 20:49, 2 replies)
I do say

'I'm goin the chippy'

Which generally means I'm off to get some special fried rice.

Maybe it's a Northern thing?
(, Sat 10 Apr 2010, 21:44, closed)
This is a well documented linguistic phenomenon
whose name escapes me, in which a specific terms becomes generalised.

Example I can think of are 'Coke' being used in parts of the US to mean any carbonated beverage.

It happens frequently in Pidgin languages which economise on vocab, and in Tok Pisin where gras (derive from English grass) came to mean grass/hair/eyebrow/beard/feather/fur. The underlying idea being that grass covers the ground, thus gras is a kind of covering.

Trademark Genericisation of words happens along similar lines eg Hoover meaning all vacuum cleaners, or Bandaid or even asprin.
(, Sun 11 Apr 2010, 5:07, closed)

« Go Back

Pages: Latest, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, ... 1