Definition:
A fashionable word or phrase that tends to lose its effectiveness through overuse.
See also:
Examples and Observations:
- " You walk into a PetSmart, a supermarket for dog and cat supplies that allows customers to shop along with their animal companions. You hear a voice on a loudspeaker say urgently, 'Would an associate report to the rubber-toys aisle.' Instantly, a guy with a mop and pail appears, zeros in on the puddle behind a shamefaced puppy and takes care of the problem.
"The job title of the person doing the mopping-up is associate. No longer is today’s man with a muck rake termed an employee; that description is deemed demeaning. Associate hints at managerial equality."
(William Safire, "On Language: Vogue-Word Watch." The New York Times, July 15, 2009) - "The best way to offset the harm of vogues is to stick resolutely, in speech and writing, to each vogue word's central meaning. Address an audience or a postcard, but not problem or a question. Call a substance or a temperament volatile, but not an issue or a situation. Express sympathy far and wide, but keep empathy for aesthetics or psychiatry. Remember Tiny Tim and avoid naming things minuscule or minimal."
(Jacques Barzun, Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers. Harper & Row, 1975) - "Viable means workable and likely to survive. It has become a 'vogue word' and is commonly used in the sense of workable or achievable. Adjectives such as durable, lasting, effective, and practical are more appropriate."
(James S. Major, Writing Classified and Unclassified Papers in the Intelligence Community. Scarecrow Press, 2009) - "A great darling among the loosely used pseudoscientific vogue words of recent years is image in the sense 'impression that others subconsciously have of someone.' A jaundiced observer of modern life might well suppose that what we actually are is not nearly so important as the image we are able--to use another vogue word--to project."
(John Algeo and Thomas Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language, 5th ed. Thomson, 2005) - "Feedback. In its rigorous scientific sense, feedback is the return to an input of part of its output, so as to provide self-corrective action. Feedback is a vogue word in a loose sense for which response would be a perfectly adequate alternative, as in 'we got a lot of valuable feedback on our advertising campaign.'"
(Ernest Gowers, et al. The Complete Plain Words, rev. ed. David R. Godine, 1988) - "Other vogue words are technical words clumsily applied to other fields. These include parameter, bottom line, interface, mode, and space; phrases like immediate feedback and close the loop; and, in a sense, ballpark figure, and touch base with you."
(Matt Young, The Technical Writer's Handbook: Writing With Style and Clarity. University Science Books, 2002)
Also Known As: voguism
