My personal preference, which came in second, has the effect of fingernails across a chalkboard: "At this point in time.
"I think it is the prevalence factor that most bothers me, along with the fact that the phrase is used by supposedly learned persons with alphabet degrees who speak like they are British butlers. For some reason, it is difficult for these scholars to realize that the last two words relating to time are about as necessary as adding Coca-Cola to Jack Daniels. One is simply language fraud and bad taste. The other is sacrilege.
It is interesting to note that third runner-up in this horse race was the word "like," used as a form of emphasis. "Like, I wish I had never started this book." "He is, like, a big, fat idiot." "Man, like, you must be kidding."
This one personally doesn't bother me a whole lot. Like, I rarely see it used except by pre-teen girls who swoon over Ricky Martin.
Coming in fourth place was the ever present "with all due respect," a phrase one generally utters when there is virtually no due respect intended. Actually, I doubt this is a big problem. I don't hear the phrase used that often outside Victorian novels by Jane Austin, and then it is rather charming.
Frankly Speaking
There are a whole series of cliches that set you up for the proverbial fall. These words are most often uttered by traveling snake-oil salesmen and politicians. But then, as I believe Will Rogers said, I repeat myself.
During the late 1950s, there was a television show called Maverick. The title character, Bret Maverick, played by actor James Garner, was a charismatic card shark in the old West. While I don't remember much from the series, I do remember an episode where the bad guy said to our hero, "Maverick, frankly I..."
Frankly, I would be lying if I wrote that I remembered the remainder of the line, but that's just the point. Maverick answered with a wry smile, "Well, my pappy used to tell me that whenever anyone started off a sentence with 'frankly,' you can pretty much be assured he is going to lie to you."
Certain truths have stuck with me through the ages. Generally, Davy Crockett, Ike Eisenhower, Bob Dylan, or Mickey Morola, a bully from my childhood (and who had by far the biggest influence on me), uttered them. They are all childhood nuggets, writ large. This time it was the drifter Maverick, but his admonition has a lot of friendly cousins. One such is: "To tell you the truth, I..."
This one implies that the party on the receiving end of the conversation was born with an IQ approximating equal to the number of toes our species is generally considered to have. In this case, the speaker acknowledges from the outset that he would not normally tell the truth, but that in this particular instance, he is prepared to do you a favor. Another phrase, which closely rivals it, is that all-time hit parade favorite: "To be perfectly honest with you..." Used car salesmen who wear chartreuse jackets are most likely to use the words.
You probably often use one or more of these phrases without the slightest malicious intent. I realize that. But listen to yourself: You're trash-talking, and you aren't even from the 'hood.
John Lister, the man behind the Internet poll, offered this advice: "When readers come across these tired expressions, they start tuning out and completely miss the message - assuming there is one." He goes on to suggest that using these terms in business is "about as professional as wearing a novelty tie or having a wacky ring tone on your cell phone."
The PR Business
In the public relations and advertising business, you have a bushel full of words that seem to imply something nefarious. However, if someone is successful at applying them, he becomes a guru or maybe a maven. At some point - I believe the early 1990s - 'maven' took over from 'guru' as the favored term for someone with a little expertise. In public relations, those who romance the English language began to call gurus-turned-mavens by the whimsical term 'spin doctor.' Spin-doctors, of course, were not really doctors at all. They didn't do brain surgery or dispense tablets. They engaged in that very uptown practice called, 'perception management.'
There are two ways to look at perception management. Some would say it is the moral equivalent of whitewashing a house that is infested by termites.
I think that is the jaded view, for generally the intent is to help solve the underlying problem and then manage perceptions. It is not the initiative, however, with which I have a problem. It is the phrase, 'perception management.' If I close my eyes, I can visualize Joseph Goebbels, standing before Adolph Hitler, suggesting they had a little PR problem and were going to have to manage perceptions.
But it is not just in the PR world that a dizzying array of names and acronyms has taken over. The peddler of remedies, often branded self-help, is the modern equivalent of the 18th century elixir salesman. He has a compound for every possibility. A recent book listed nearly 70 miracle cures, everything from one-minute managing to total quality control as branded remedies for any business malady.
Therefore, something like perception management is described as a proprietary tool of revolutionary proportions, when in fact it is 95 percent common sense, and what PR folks should do every day. The same can be said of '360-degree branding,' 'the whole-egg approach' and the 101 other gimmicks applied to basic products to give them marketing spin.
Minor Language Fraud
There are, of course, a host of cliches that are far from the radioactive ones mentioned above, but the use of which should consign the user to a weekend at Dollywood.
Some of them are jarringly obvious. The term '24/7' has come to represent the company that is available to serve clients around the clock. This is generally a throwaway line, because during the better part of those 24 hours the client is snoozing or watching Friends reruns on TV, and on two of those seven days he is stuck in traffic between home and the beach. It is, more than anything, a marketing gimmick. I have used it myself, though with no real success.
Also on the cliche list is 'awesome,' which I personally think is a rather influential adjective. However, I assume the word receives cliche status as a one-word exclamation point, as in the high-decibel AWESOME, as in "Awesome, man." I thought that the term went out with beatnik poetry, but I don't get out much.
There are other overused business terms that crop up frequently. These include 'blue-sky thinking' and 'ballpark figure.'
I confess that the first one was a puzzle when I first heard it some two decades ago. I immediately pictured something more visual, more relaxing, and more beautiful than merely sitting in a stuffy conference room, tossing ideas around. I soon learned that blue-sky thinking had little to do with the blue sky - or even thinking, for that matter. A contemplative 15 minutes spent in the shower or on a walk in the park is more conducive to thinking. Blue-sky thinking is, in essence, a forced march toward a creative solution. I don't recommend it for anyone, unless, of course, you wear combat boots.
Ballpark figure, in terms of business, is the phase tossed out lightly for estimations that bear not the slightest resemblance to the actual cost. Someone who had never seen the inside of a ballpark probably coined the term. These days, baseball parks are smaller than in the old days - a design quirk I assume was intended to create more home runs and, as a result, greater excitement. To hit a ball out of Cincinnati's old Riverfront Stadium, a batter aiming for centerfield had to clobber it 420 feet. The center field fence at the new, pretentiously named Great American Stadium is 15 feet closer. The next time someone says they are going to give you a ballpark figure, ask which ballpark.
There is also the dismissive comment that such-and-such "isn't rocket science." Rocket science isn't rocket science. After about 50 years of trying, we are just now tossing space junk within several thousand miles of Saturn. The most tangible things some believe to have come from the space program are a few moon rocks and an orange-flavored drink called Tang. Compare that feat with something really difficult-such as filling out a U.S. income tax return.
Businesses trying to spur creativity encourage employees to "think outside the box" or sometimes to "color outside the lines." What box?
I have told my colleagues that I want them thinking outside the box, around the box, inside the box and on top of the box. As to coloring outside the lines, the metaphor is a stretch, even for indergartners, who actually do color outside the lines. These, like so many other sayings, were creative thunderbolts when first uttered. Today, they are as quaint as the lyrics of Bill Haley's 1956 hit, "See you later, alligator. After 'while, crocodile." (Which, by the way, in a nod to nostalgia, I say to my five year-old all the time.)
Sometimes cliches appear which really are nonsensical, but which are given credibility because they appeared in a movie, a book or on the back of a cereal box. One is 'pushing the envelope.' You're a smart person. In the abstract, does that make sense to you - to push an envelope? Why wouldn't we pull the envelope? Why wouldn't we just open the damn envelope? Or put a stamp on it.
Tom Wolfe's book, "The Right Stuff," and the movie that followed popularized the phrase. To early astronauts and test pilots, pushing the envelope meant to test the boundaries of most anything: endurance, taste, your spouse. It fell into the cool lexicon, along with another cliche from the same book, 'screw the pooch,' which means to commit a grievous aviation error involving an unscheduled off-airport landing. Simply put, it means crashing.
As the late columnist Dorothy Parker suggested, we have now run the gamut of cliches from A to B. There are billions of others, most of which will at the end of the day never be buried under what we wish would be that proverbial 'level playing field.'
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