Hey, Americans ...

[blamebrampton]

Do you ever use forms of cliché other than plain old cliché? Such as clichéd or clichés? I see it used in a manner that I would consider wrong so often that I am wondering if it is one of those wacky idioms that English develops up all around the world. Or it could just be young people today with their emo music and Twittering ...

Comments

[faynia.livejournal.com]

Damn, that would have been the best $30 dollar purchase ever! I should have hunted around the store harder.

I actually bought some new perfume. It does smell good, but when you combine the perfume with the room freshener spray I got from Yankee Candle, well...Brothel-licious.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I bet the salesgirls would have hidden them for their own use ;-)

And how does your mother know what a brothel smells like, I ask?

[silvershinigami.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, that is definitely a word where not having seen it before would cause some confusion.

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

And if i were to write beowulf 2 the monster's mother strikes back i might deploy it. Absent that...

[empress-jae.livejournal.com]

it might have to do with dialect in some cases, and also folks just never having heard the word properly which in turn means they have never been corrected. man, what community was i perusing the other day?...anyway, while trying to make her point, a commenter threw in "intensive purpose" into her rambling. after a couple of WAT? responses from the masses, i finally realized she was trying to say "to all intents and purpose" and decided to gently correct her. in a hissy fit, she said i was wrong, and then an argument broke out after others told her that SHE was in the wrong. i just sat back and palmfaced. youth.

regardless, i like your twittering theory, or as my Finnish boss calls it "twooting"

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

HA! Oh dear, yes. Poor lamb, if she hadn't argued, it would have been one of those perfectly understandable mistakes, like the non-punning use of petty bourgeoisie.

And Twooting is BRILLIANT!

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Please do! Grendel's mother was far scarier.

I mind mistakes with logical reasons behind them far less than ones that stem from derangement.

[pennswoods.livejournal.com]

I strongly agree with you that there are changes afoot in the language, but do feel that some should be stomped on.

*snort*

Good luck with that. ;)

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I accept that fighting for fulsome is a lost cause, but I feel that I still have a chance with keeping utilise in its manual-speak and Public Service ghetto!

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

I don't accept webster as authoritative as it is foreign. And the oxford citation of gotten as non-standard means wrong. Wrong or geordie and i'm not a geordie. And i think brammers was refering to the deplorable habit of not putting the d on the adjectival form not suggesting cliched was wrong. On the contrary.

[suttonwriter.livejournal.com]

"Oh, I HATE utlise/ze. It is such an ugly word. I always mark it up and ask the writer if they really want to construct a tone that reads as dull Public Service?"

I once told a Business Writing class that anyone who used utilize would lose a letter grade from an assignment. Then one of the students pointed out that university policy wouldn't allow me. I've made my peace with it on grounds that at least it's better than utilization.

Just out of curiosity, how hard is it for you as a beta to switch from British to American spellings of words (like utilize/utilise)?

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

I am mostly good at switching between varieties of English, having to do it all the time for work, but I can find it very traumatising when caught between punctuation styles. You may have noticed that I go through periods of using single or double quotes for speech in my fic: they match exactly with the styles of mags and books I am working on as I simply cannot switch backwards and forwards.

That university had a bad policy, yours was better.

[glorafin.livejournal.com]

It seems that, as many others, I had understood your post the wrong way. I thought that you had problems with clichés or clichéd, not that you missed them dearly for being ignored by ignorant Americans. :)

Wouldn't "phony" be an acceptable replacement for clichéd? I always thought they were synonyms. In French, clichés would be translated as "téléphoné", which is a literal translation of "phony".

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

In English, clichéd is closest to hackneyed: a phrase that may or may not be true and accurate, but, regardless of its integral worth, has been so over-used as to be rendered meaningless and trite.

Phony is only useful for things that are in some way fake, alas, since it is often a very good synonym for the clichés that fall into that category.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Both d and s endings are fine and standard, but they seem to be disappearing in US English. I am considering mounting a rescue effort ;-)

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

Isn't it just the default assumption that they are doing it right, and you are suggesting that some are doing it wrong, and therefore searching for ways others have been wrong to fill in the gaps.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

Isn't it just the default assumption that they are doing it right

Ah ... there's 1914-2008 in a nutshell ...

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

What's happened to fulsome?

[rosathome.livejournal.com]

I have seen people write 'And, vwala!'

And I must admit to some sympathy. If you've never seen a word like that written, it's not obvious where to look it up in the dictionary to check its spelling.

[shiv5468.livejournal.com]

Surely that accounts for the bulk of history.

[melusinahp.livejournal.com]

Oh. I had thought that was actually correct. Once I submitted a movie review to a magazine and the changed my "cliched" to "cliche."

Maybe it's just the American usage?

[sporkmetender.livejournal.com]

I must confess to using "gotten" on a fairly regular basis (it's part of an American upbringing, I suppose), but I strenuously object to using "cliché" in place of "clichéd" and "clichés." I have a friend who does it a lot, and it bugs me to death. So I guess I'm some sort of weird hybrid formation :)

[calanthe-fics.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know what the OED says. But 'gotten' is just a crap word, isn't it?!!!!

[calanthe-fics.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised you even have to ask the question, because it's not like we don't know the answer.

:D

And zombies.