The Most Powerful, Most Irritating, and Most Nonsensical Words in English

Our thanks to the readers, bloggers, marketers, and (on occasion) inmates who pass along news about innovations in the English language. Here are a few of the items that have recently crossed our screen.

• Meh--Who Cares?
  HarperCollins announced on Monday that the interjection meh will appear in the 2009 edition of Collins English Dictionary. Made popular by The Simpsons and favored by jaded text messagers, meh is defined as "an expression of indifference or boredom."
  
  We say, "Ho-hum."



• "The Serial Syntax-Killer From Wasilla High"
  In his New York Times column last Friday, Dick Cavett pointed to a remarkable sentence formulated by Governor Sarah Palin in her interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News:

  I don't know, because I remember the discussion about Africa, my concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars, I wanted to make sure that that didn't happen anymore."

  Note to budding rhetoricians: one of the more polite terms for this sort of fractured syntax is aposiopesis.



• The Return of Powerful Words
  Stand back! You're about to hear "the 10 most powerful words in English": you, results, health, guarantee, discover, love, proven, safety, save, and new. And who made this potent discovery? "The psychology department at Yale University," claims the author of a new book on "copywriting secrets."
  
  We'll let you in on a little secret of our own. Similar lists of the top 10 (or 12 or 13) "powerful words" have been making the rounds for the past half century. Sometimes the list is attributed to researchers at Yale--or at Harvard or the University of California. Sometimes it's passed along as wisdom gleaned from a major advertising agency or an unnamed marketing magazine or a wise old editor.
  
  To learn more about the history of this bogus list, see Mark Liberman's article on "Yale University Researchers" in the archive of the Language Log.



• At the End of Another Day
  In his new book, A Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare (Oxford University Press), lexicographer Jeremy Butterfield presents a list of the 10 "most irritating phrases" in English:
  1. at the end of the day
  2. fairly unique
  3. I personally
  4. at this moment in time
  5. with all due respect
  6. absolutely
  7. It's a nightmare
  8. shouldn't of
  9. 24/7
  10. It's not rocket science
  The list was compiled by researchers working with the massive database known as the Oxford University Corpus. Commendable, but at the end of the day, the Oxford list is just a stunted version of the inventory of linguistic peeves put together by our readers: 200 Words and Expressions That Tick You Off. And we say that, of course, with all due respect.

If you run across a word that's especially odd, irritating, or powerful, please let us know about it by clicking on the "comments" button below.

More Words About Words:

• Homer Simpson's Figures of Speech
• Common Word Roots
• "A New Song of New Similes," by John Gay

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer for the article "Pardon the Interjection," by Ben Yagoda, Slate, February 16, 2007