words you hate?

[Olly Buckle]

Ken11 has started a 'your favourite/ most useful word' thread https://www.writingforums.com/thread...t-useful-words , but how about words you hate? Completely useless words? Words you dislike writing even in this thread?

[escorial]

I dislike swear words....I say them but I just don't like to read them

[Phil Istine]

Not one word but a pairing. Unless it's character appropriate, I intensely dislike the construction "off of". There's something about it that pisses me off in a way that goes far beyond those mere words.

[Aquilo]

Gasp.




If I could ban gasp from the English lexicon, I would. Then I'd bring it back, throw it down the stairs, trample on it, shoot it with a gun, then hire a hitman to finsh the job again. That goes for gasped, gasping, and gasps.

[PiP]

I hate the word awesome.

[velo]

Thanks, PiP, awesome choice.

[PiP]

Thanks, PiP, awesome choice.

even worse: absolutely awesome

[bdcharles]

This might sound a bit peculiar but I realised today that I'm not overly keen on the word father. Every time I write it, on my kids school forms for example, I get this feathery, moustachey, breathy feeling, like someone is leaning in a bit too close. I could say more but I just ... I mean, it sounds iffy enough as it is. I really have no idea where this aversion comes from. Well, actually I have some, but it's nothing to do with my actual dad. Apologies for any fellow f-, any male parents or guardians or for anyone who struggles with this word too for whatever reason.

[velo]

I hate "like."

Like, when (younger) people use it to, like, put a pause in a sentence or, like, you know, drone on and not actually say anything.

In writing I hate the massive overuse of the word in comparative phrases and avoid it all costs. "He looked worn and aged like an overripe prune." 'Like' and everything after it in that admittedly simplistic example are superfluous which is usually how I see this type of phrasing.

[Olly Buckle]

One of my pet peeves is 'just'. It is usually unnecessary and rarely adds anything. I think it is a word from conversation that people stick in to give themselves extra thinking time, you don't need that with writing.

To illustrate

It is usually just unnecessary and rarely adds anything. I think it is just a word from conversation that people stick in to give themselves extra thinking time, you just don't need that with writing.

Three of them, and they don't add anything to the meaning. Then, speaking of meaning, it has so many different meanings, 'He just caught the bus'; was it that he was there only in the nick of time, or was it that catching the bus was the only thing he did, or possibly he caught the bus with no secondary intentions. In speech the intonation would probably tell you which (if any) of these were meant, in the written form it conveys nothing. Perhaps my dislike is not just, but I do just hate it.