Words/Phrases That I Hate

17 March 2024 Update

Literally - The meaning of this word has been steadily eroded by the past two generations, to the point where it's just a meaningless grunt that can be safely omitted from nearly every sentence it's now used in without changing the meaning one bit. No one needs you to clarify that you "literally" slept last night or that you "literally" ate a pizza. You're not nearly profound enough for anyone to mistakenly assume you're speaking in deep metaphors, Hemingway.
Touch grass - This just feels like a silly, nonsensical phrase to me all-around. Most obviously because it's meant to express that someone needs to return to reality, yet no one ever actually touches grass unless they're walking around barefoot outside (enjoy stepping on spiders and pieces of gravel!) or they're high on LSD and are rolling around in their backyard contemplating being one with the planets and the stars. Or they're gardening, but I don't have a reason to try to make fun of that particular activity so I'll ignore it here.
I can personally confirm that, after repeatedly encountering this phrase via someone saying it to me like it was some sort of argument-ending comeback, I did get up, physically walk outside and briefly touch some dew-dampened grass just so that I could let them know that the mission was accomplished. As expected, adding to humanity's violations against the planet by brazenly groping Mother Nature did not bring me any some of grand, life-changing revelations despite how often I had seen the practice offered as life-changing advice.
But even if we are to assume that I misinterpreted the seemingly simplistic directive of copping a feel of a patch of plant life, what does the implication that one needs to be in physical contact with grass to have a firm grasp on reality mean for, say, people residing in the desert, the Arctic, or perhaps on a boat sailing the seas? Does touching sand, ice, or sea water also offer some measure of enlightenment, or are sailors doomed to a life of reverie and delusion? And what of the fact that grass only evolved into existence under 100 million years ago, preventing most species that ever thrived on the planet from benefitting from its wisdom-bestowing sorcery?
Y'all - You know what's even more annoying than embarrassing redditors who have never so much as set foot in the American south trying to use southern slang? Embarrassing redditors who have never so much as set foot in the American south, and who routinely bash people in the south as being unintelligent due to the way they speak, and who otherwise melt down like spoiled toddlers over anything they deem to be "cultural appropriation", trying to artificially force southern slang into their "city bugman" vocabulary.
Hearing or reading a phrase that sounds charmingly quaint and inviting in its natural habitat being used by a condescending organism with no personality and an inflated sense of superiority built upon what sorts of restaurants they've eaten in, is akin to watching a fish suffocate on a table after being pulled out of a lake. Or perhaps like a dog being paraded around in a ridiculous Halloween costume that was foisted on it so that its soulless abomination of a human could grab some cheap attention from the animal's public humilation.
You must be fun at parties - Whatever actual meaning this phrase may have once had when it was first used has been lost a long time, and it now serves no purpose beyond a meaningless copy-and-pasted comeback whenever someone has been proven wrong in an argument. "You know more than me about this subject I tried to spout off on? Oh yeah? Well I bet you're boring at social gatherings!" It's basically a not-very-veiled way of saying "don't you dare contradict me." Admittedly, even if I was mentally wired to be able to derive any enjoyment from parties, I doubt I'd be able to be much fun at whatever sordid soirees people who use this phrase managed to get themselves invited to.
And why is it always parties? Why not, say, attempt to "win" an argument by suddenly redirecting the subject to your perceived superiority in Doom deathmatch or your cooking finesse? "Oh really? Sea sponges actually predate the Cambrian explosion and likely all other animal life by hundreds of millions of years? Well I could blow your fraggin' head off in Doom any day, buddy. And my Christmas cookies could eat yours for dinner." (Real people express their confidence in their cooking like that, right?)
Call me - As much as I detest speaking on the phone, I have accepted that it is an unfortunate necessity in life sometimes, and thus something that I must put up with. What I will not accept, however, is people who seemingly have the time and energy to demand that someone call them back, usually via E-mail or voicemail, but not enough of either to provide even a modicum of information about the discussion they wish to have. This is incredibly irritating for those of us who are abysmal at speaking over the phone by default and thus dread such conversations and want to be able to prepare for them as much as possible, obviously, but it's a moronic way to conduct affairs with people overall.
One of the nice things about having a general idea what a conversation will be about in advance is that it gives one the ability to conduct research in case whatever their future conversation partner is looking for is not, in fact, front and center in their mind. It can also potentially save both parties from a useless conversation that amounts to something akin to "uh, I have no idea, I'll look around in the attic on the weekend and let you know if I see that document."
Next time you're looking to save time by skimping on the precious seconds it would take to express a proper phone call request, perhaps contemplate the time you'd save not having to wait for your conversational partner to not sit there and try to remember what you're talking about or, or to sift through files or paperwork to find out.
- Can you do me a favour? - Adding this one here because it feels tangentially related and I always found it to be an exceedingly odd and unintentionally comedic question when not immediately followed up with details on the favour in question. Simply asking someone if they will fulfill an unknown favour for you is akin to walking into a bank and asking if they'll grant you a loan prior to providing any details.
  In other words, the bank would appreciate knowing beforehand if you're a deadbeat lunatic who is there to "borrow" a king's ransom to fund an expedition to Atlantis to make contact with the colony of Saturnians that you believe to be behind your malfunctioning television.
  Yes, I would be happy to let you borrow my crowbar. No, I will not assassinate the Prime Minister of Antarctica as revenge for her still not returning your crowbar after borrowing it three summers ago. And given that you're asking me to agree to the task before I know anything about it, I will assume it's closer to the latter than the former and automatically decline out of principle to avoid the ire of the infamous Antarctic Secret Police.
My guy/my dude - Another irritating and condescending phrase used by unoriginal children who don't know better than to repeat every grating piece of meme speech they hear without questioning how stupid it sounds. I especially take umbrage at the "my" part, as it implies I would permit myself to allow any sort of association with anyone who soils their tongue with such phrases. I don't care if you're my biological sibling and you just saved me from being eaten by a school of piranha, calling me "your guy" is more than enough for me to rightfully disown you.
Any and all pointless and lazy abbreviations that millennials and zoomers overuse (examples: sus, devs, veggies, pfp, ngl, fr, fam, wdym, tbh, etc, etc, etcetera) - I keep planning to write an entire article dedicated to this grievance, but I figure I'd mention it here too because it fits. It's an increasingly persasive problem I am increasingly an "angry old man waves his fist at passing cars" about, even despite the fact that my own generation (as much as I wish there was a way to disown them) is guilty of starting it, and I had myself indulged in during my younger and dumber years.
It has gotten to the point where I have made a point of never again looking up any abbreviations or acronyms I don't understand as my own spiteful and pointless way of protesting the degradation of language into a bunch of unintelligible caveperson grunts. If a person does not care enough about their message to take an extra second to communicate their point in a coherent manner, then it cannot possibly be important enough for me to read or understand. Next!
Admittedly I can often just guess within a few seconds what an acronym/abbreviation means, but then there's always unintutiive and nonsensical drivel like "pfp" for "profile picture", which is the equivalent of abbreviating "pizza sauce" to "pzs". You know what? If you're so childish that you can't spell out 11 extra characters to make yourself intelligible, you are not above just typing it out as "pp".
Now, obviously, I am not nearly extremist enough to argue that all abbreviations are a negative thing and should be avoided (I did, for example, abbreviate etcetera at the start of this entry, humourously exasperated final usage aside). I don't know where the red line should be drawn, only that people as a whole have crossed it and left it in the dust three towns ago. I am not in any way against seasoning food either, but I would still take umbrage if I were to be served a dish prepared by someone who uses a snow shovel to add spices.
Narcissist, toxic, gaslighting, etc - All these and other psychological terms that had actual meanings before they were co-opted, primarily by Redditors and millennial women, as generic labels for anyone who has done anything they don't like!

28 August 2021 Update

User experiences - I first consciously remember hearing of this phrase when I was looking up Adobe's suite of programs (NOT "apps") and seeing if they had anything other than Photoshop, Illustrator, and Lightroom that would be useful for me to learn and found the goofily named "Adobe XD", which was described as a program used to create "user experiences." Taken aback by how comically vague this sounded, I assumed Adobe was being shy and really didn't want me to know what this program did and moved on. I later learned after a friend linked me to this article that "user experiences" is apparently a term for a particularly cancerous trend in interface design.
Beyond being the name of a detestable design trend, "experience" itself is also an objectively meaningless term because it could be applied to mean absolutely anything and is often used to just make things sound more glamourous than they actually are. Sneaking laxatives into someone's tea can be described as creating an "unexpected diarrhea experience". I've actually seen a goddamn corporate credit card website describe its service as a "banking experience." "I'd better have a beer or take a xanax to calm my nerves, my statement is coming due and thus I must once again engage myself in the... the banking experience!!"
Solutions - Whenever I hear a business describe itself as "offering solutions", I assume that either they're either a poorly masqueraded money laundering operation, or the person in charge of their marketing is too unambitious to even look up what their own company does. Unless you're a freelancer who charges money to do people's mathematics homework for them, describing your work as "offering solutions" is so vague as to be utterly meaningless. The business equivalent of telling someone who asks what you do for a living "I... uhh... provide a service... in exchange for money."
Content creator - Back in the day, we had charming words such as "netizen" and "homesteader" to describe people who created websites and artwork online. This was prior to the apparent machine rebellion that led to our lexicon being replaced with the cold, vague, and robotic terms of our new mechanical overlords. Any time I hear someone waffling on about "apps" and "content creation", I get almost nauseous enough to kneel down over a toilet and create some "content" of my own.
Person with autism - I covered this a few times in some of my autism pages but I might as well give it a mention here while I'm at it for the benefit of any readers who don't go there. Person-first language is a nonsensical abomination invented by progressive neurotypical busybodies and is almost universally rejected by actually autistic people for the simple reason that autism describes the fundamental wiring of our brains and the way we perceive and interact with the world. Autism is our very self, not a fashion accessory that we can leave at home when going to a crowded event in order to avoid melting down from sensory overload.
Uneducated - Some time in the modern era, it became particularly trendy amongst people that are so abysmal at investing that they dedicated 4 of their prime years, along with tens of thousands of dollars towards obtaining something that has no potential to increase their personal wealth, to look down on rural and blue collar people for being "uneducated". When western civilisation inevitably collapses just as every other historical civilisation has, I'm sure those ignorant "hillbillies" who know how to grow, hunt, and prepare their own food, repair and maintain all of their machinery, and live entirely self-sufficiently will be lamenting their critical lack of knowledge about the effects of Peruvian face-painting trends on 1970s Anarcho-Marxist ideology.
I am autistic and thus no stranger to filling my head with useless information, but I at least have enough self-awareness to not believe myself to be superior to others because of my comparative wealth of knowledge about Jiren's ~~sultry abs~~ compelling backstory and character development.
Outdated - Someone once criticised my website for looking "like it was made decades ago" (apparently the dozen 88x31 buttons at the bottom of every page, including the Hosted on Neocities one, did not clue this brilliant sleuth into the fact that this was intentional), as if this somehow was a negative. While I try to make a point of being humble about my work, I cannot help but question the cognitive ability of anyone who prefers the insipid and soulless look of 99% of modern websites over the funky, creative, and unique designs that abound on Neocities and other Web 1.0 sanctums.
Much the same, I find it hard to understand how anyone could think that the visual trainwreck of the UI of the modern windows 10, which appears to have been frantically slapped together the morning before it was due in Microsoft Paint by one cripplingly hungover UI designer, can be considered superior to the sublime but comparatively ancient aesthetics of Windows 98
Even putting specific examples aside, the entire notion of "newer is better" is wholly flawed to begin with. Regardless of how much people may want to believe otherwise, human history has never been a steady march towards progress, instead being more akin to the wayward zig-zagging of drug addiction recovery, littered with periods of regression and failure. Using this metaphor, Web and UI design are currently passed out in a ditch next to their smoking wreck of a car after relapsing into a three week bender and getting disowned by their family for drunkenly sexually harassing their 8 year old niece. May Penelope finally drag them into rehab by their hair.
Socially acceptable - Whenever I read people expressing the desire for certain fashion choices to be socially acceptable, I am forced to assume they are soulless husks with no likeable traits whatsoever. Either that, or they are under the impression that there actually exists a Fashion Stasi lurking and waiting to abduct them for violating arbitrary social norms. I have met quite a number of people who initially rubbed me the wrong way with an off-putting quirk and who I would later learn to admire for that same quirk because as I got to know them better and learned to like them, that quirk became, in my mind, rebranded as part of the whole wonderful "package" of who they are. Excessively worrying about being as "normal" and banal as possible implies that a person has no redeeming traits to speak of.
It's 2021! - If the rationale behind your worldview is what is currently fashionable in the year you're living in, you are assuredly a computer program. I sometimes wonder how many of the halfwits who parrot this phrase would immediately start raping and enslaving their fellow people if they were sent into the distant past with a time machine. When in the Neolithic, do as the Neolithic people do, right? The venerable wiseman known as Grog said it's acceptable behaviour, and everyone seems to like him!

12 May 2021 Update

You're so quiet - This one invariably comes from an obnoxious, boisterous extrovert who is unable to wrap their empty head around why anyone would avoid broadcasting every single inane non-thought that they manage to produce out for all the world to bear witness to. My go-to response to this remark is to continue to remain silent, which either passes the awkwardness on to them or creeps them out, depending on how acquainted they are with me.
How are you? - Thank you for asking!! I'm hungover, suffering from diarrhea, and wishing that my ruminations weren't being interrupted by another round of repetitive, insipid smalltalk. Anything else you care to enquire about, or am I free to go now?
I can't even - This is the equally loathsome sibling of "I'm Literally Shaking" (as described below), usually uttered by a millennial desperate to virtue signal on how someone's speech has so utterly shook them to their very foundation that their ability to verbally communicate has been reduced to the level of a stroke victim. No one cares. Do what the rest of us do and lie down under a weighted blanket until it passes.
Embrace change, change is inevitable - Being autistic, this is a platitude that particularly rubs me the wrong way. Many things are inevitable, but for some reason "change" is the only one that gets this treatment. I've never heard anyone cheering having to pay taxes or having their loved ones pass away. Death is just as inevitable as change, and every time I hear someone spouting this platitude, I sorely wish that they would just run off and embrace it already.
The miracle of conception - I can give the phrase "the miracle of life" some leeway since no one understands how life evolved from inanimate matter yet, nor how multicellular organisms evolved from single-celled bacteria, and there is not yet any concrete evidence that either of these events have occurred anywhere else in the universe. Conception on the other hand, an everyday event that has successfully occurred over 100 billion times among humans alone, is about as miraculous as digestion. If the comparison seems abrasive, contemplate the most foul foods you've ever had the displeasure of eating, and the fact that your digestive system was able to make use of it to create more of you.
You should smile more! - The purpose of smiling is to broadcast one's good mood, and the only way anyone receiving this remark is going to be in a good mood is if the speaker immediately slips and breaks their leg in three places.
It's so gorgeous outside! (said on a summer day) - Nothing says gorgeous like swarms of insects, suffocating heat/humidity, and large packs of revolting, sweaty people wearing far too little clothing.
You can't say/do that! - I somehow managed to.

Mental Illness/Disorder - I may be biased as a "mentally ill" (autistic) person, but I personally find it disturbing that society put verifiable psychopaths who routinely abduct, torture, gaslight, and drug children (and adults!) for the crime of having a differently functioning brain, in charge of deciding what constitutes mental illness. If we're going to seriously combat the problem of mental illness, rounding up all psychiatrists and firing them into a black hole would be a very positive step. I hear there may be a small one in the outer limits of our solar system, so it doesn't even have to be particularly difficult to take them there.
App - I had something I wanted to write here, but "lolwut" put my hatred for this word much better than I could over on their Neocities page, so I'll just link to that instead. I will only add that it's an irritating non-word and the extent of its proliferation is a depressing representation of how disgustingly normiefied the Internet and nerd culture have become.
Woke - I swear this word is the NPC's version of a uniform. It's a remarkably efficient way of communicating "I am a mindless pawn with no original thoughts or opinions of my own and consider this a point of pride. Watch me butcher my language's grammar in the same manner that the mainstream media taught me to do, in order to demonstrate that I am a wild and zany free-thinker!"
I'm Literally Shaking - If you were "literally" shaking as a result of whatever your predicament is, you'd be seeking out the services of a priest or making an emergency call to your dealer, not fishing for attention online.
Diversity - If diversity is really so important, then why is diversity of skin colour the only kind of diversity that is ever pushed? Why is it that not a single diversity screecher taking on the cause of remedying the 80% unemployment rate among autistic people? Why is it OK to abuse the oh-so-diverse women and non-whites if they get uppity and start having opinions of their own?
Socials - Why is millennial slang so irritating and lazy? You can look up slang for any time period in the past and find lots of words and phrases that are objectively the cat's meow. Millennial slang is largely just stupid abbreviations that make the speaker sound like a lazy child.
Adulting - Speaking of stupid millennial slang, who thought this one was a good idea? Contrary to what you may believe, if basic adult responsibilities are so burdensome for you to have you invent a new term to complain about them, you are an adult in nothing but physical age.
Cancel Culture - Art is culture. People being fired from their job due to mass-harassment from 400 lb leftist hamplanets who lack the mental stability to tolerate a single living being on the planet having a divergent viewpoint because their minds are broken from decades of seeing their ugly mugs in the mirror every day is not culture.
Well-Adjusted/Healthy - Every time I see someone use either of these words, it's to push something bad under the guise of "everybody else is doing it, so you should be a good sheeple and do so too! What are you, a weirdo?!" Reminds me of the quote "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
Fascist/Nazi - I am sick of the fact that 99% of the modern usage of these words comes from historically illiterate leftists that accuse anyone who disagrees with them of fascism while advocating for what is essentially a bizarro Fourth Reich led by gender-confused freakshows. It's like if Smokey the Bear spent his time accusing bushes of being forest fires and advocating pouring gasoline all over them and lighting them on fire in the interest of protecting the forest.
Dogs and Cats - I have no idea why this has become such a prevalent thing but it's both obnoxious and annoying. Even disregarding that cats are infinitely superior to dogs, the grammatically correct way of saying this is "cats and dogs" since C comes before D in the alphabet. 3rd graders know this, why don't you?

I guess that's all that I can think of for now. Thankfully I make a point to not talk to other people aside from basic, necessary interactions, or else this list might have been much longer. I might update it in the future if I think of anything else.