I’m very lucky to work with very smart people, as you might be as well. But the thing about very smart people is that they often make you question your estimation of them by saying very dumb things. Here are some of those things that drive me crazy… I’d love to hear yours.
- “Let’s flush out the idea.” It amazes me how many people say this. What you want is to flesh out an idea, as if the idea was a skeleton, and you needed to add flesh to it to make it complete. If you have no ideas and you want to flush them out, as you would a terrorist, I suppose that’s acceptable. Also, if your ideas are shit, you should probably flush them out anyway.
- “We’ll need to action that.” Action is not a verb. The verb form of action is “do.” Your flagrant waste of syllables is causing global warming.
- “Let’s ideate around that.” First rule of language – you can’t just make up whatever word you want and start using it, much less tenses of that word unless you are Shakespeare. You, my friend, are no Shakespeare.
- “Jimmy and myself…” I don’t know when we started using the reflexive pronoun to refer to ourselves, but it’s wrong – and pointless. The correct version is “me” or “I” depending on the sentence. If you’re confused, take the other person out of the story, and you’ll see which pronoun you should use. “Jimmy and I went to the store,” but “Hernando came to the store with Jimmy and me.” (Disclosure: I didn’t understand this one until I was about 24 and my grammar nazi boss corrected me. My kindergarten teacher taught me that it was ALWAYS “the other person and I.” I hate her so much.)
- “I literally wet myself,” or any other variant of creating emphasis by stating something you didn’t literally do. “Literally” is not intended as punctuation. When you use this word incorrectly, you actually say the opposite of what you mean. Unless your boss goose-steps around the office and wears a red arm band he is not, in fact, “literally a Nazi.”
- “Let’s take a decision.” I’ve noticed that it’s usually bureaucrats and government types who use this, and I’m not sure why. I’m not sure it’s technically wrong, but it makes you sound like a government-bot, which is a good enough reason in my books.
- “A whole nother story…” Really? Come on!
And, the bonus round…
- “Media is…” The word media is plural – one medium, two media. Same rule applies to social media. Anal, but I’ve found this distinction actually helps me understand the concept of social media better. When you start thinking of it as a collection of individual media that are inherently social, it makes more sense than one amorphous idea.
By way of disclosure, I should point out that yes, I do correct people’s grammar on a constant basis, and am very unpleasant to be around.
