[^ Edward Gorey, you know---never a wrong word]
I was talking to Michael in a comment on his blog post "Zillions" about words that make you shudder.
He also posted about certain words here:
"Words I can live without".
I don't know why, but I just cringe at the word munch.
I guess it's partly the usage, not just the sound---it sounds like cutesy advertising to me. But it's also the sound, even when it's written, it makes me want to scream!
I don't mind crunch though. Hm, maybe a little I do.
Let's see.
"She crunched on an apple"?
Yeah, this annoys me. But nowhere near as much as munch.
Weird.
Sometimes it's the sound + the meaning.
I remember film director Mike Nichols hated the word smegma.
Words for slimy things sometimes sound icky themselves.
Michael volunteered mucilage. [I originally spelled this "muscilage", which Michael commented would be a good name for really strong glue. Heh, yes: "For Muscular Jobs".]
And there's also the squicky mucilaginous.
And yet I don't mind the word slime... or even slime mold.
But moist?
That tips toward icky again.
Some neologisms just drive me nuts. Some are really clever (can't think of an example!), or fun or generally nonannoying to me.
Hm... this is a newer usage, not a new word, but, like, I like using like (like there). (Is that a Valley Girlism? Too much of it can get annoying, but whatever.)
But I hate staycation and gi-normous.
Staycation also has a meaning I dislike:
it implies the normal thing to do when you have time off is to travel. You only stay home because you can't afford to go to Disneyland or something. This is an American view of life I dislike: that it's better to be in motion than at rest, and it's more prestigious or valuable to do things or have things that cost money than not.
[The departed commenter who defended the Confederate statues used in their defense that "someone paid good money" for them. The commenter was English, but this is a common US pov too.]
Sometimes it's the usage of a word that annoys.
I don't mind most grammar variations, but for some reason I cringe when I hear "I" and "me" mixed up, as in,
"Come along with Mikey and I."
(Tip I learned from an English teacher when I was a kid:
To decide whether to use "I" or "me," take the other person's name out of the sentence. You wouldn't say, "Come along with I.")
An innocent variation that grates on my ears:
"Anyways" for anyway.
It also bugged me when I lived in Chicago and heard people commonly pronounce Illinois as Illi-noise.
But they were natives! So it was a correct usage (following the rule that people who live in a place get to call it whatever they want--ditto for personal names---once someone told me I capitalized my Italian last name wrong, and I wanted to punch her). I just had to accept it. BUT I DIDN'T LIKE IT.
Sometimes it's the rules of grammar that annoy me.
I don't hold with the rule against split infinitives, for instance, where you aren't supposed to put a descriptive word between the "to" and the verb.
This is a useless holdout from Latin.
Like, following that rule, Star Trek's "to boldly go" [where no man has gone before] is wrong:
"to go" shouldn't get a word in between "to" and "go". But who cares? In fact, often an adverb works best tucked inside the infinitive like that.
So I sometimes feel resentful if someone too blatantly avoids split infinitives or corrects them, like "to go boldly," with an air as if they feel morally superior for not splitting infinitives. [I confess I am thinking of a certain someone I used to know.]
And that gets at a thing about language:
Some of this is far more about class than about right and wrong, grating or graceful usages. Grammar as a social gatekeeper.
Granted, sometimes there are too many words inserted after "to," and you get lost before you get to the rest of the verb, but that's just bad writing.
Nonetheless, however you munch and crunch it, some words are just icky!!!
Do you have any words that bug you?
