Good Copy, Bad Copy

Firstly, thanks to everyone for putting forward your suggestions about why the sign in yesterday's post might annoy me.

Can you see why I get annoyed every time I walk past this plaque? It's on a house not far from my office and I can see two things wrong with it.

Launching a new series of posts on bad copy inspired by bad science, I hereby present to you the first ever dental hygiene product to harness the power of string theory.

Nice piece on linguistic inflation from the BBC website.

Have you noticed that the word “education” has gone out of fashion? Yep, it’s been replaced by “learning” – that horrible, anaemic little word favoured by people who believe thinking is an elitist activity.

I can honestly say that I can think of no possible situation in which I would find the need to use the word “facilitate”. It’s got far too many syllables, for a start.

I’m perfectly happy for you to use the word “impact”. If, that is, you’re writing a paper on ballistics, a police report about a car crash, or a summary of theories of how the dinosaurs were wiped out.

From hotels to hedge funds, it seems that everything is “boutique” these days. But let’s face it, "boutique" is just a euphemism for "small".

Here’s something annoying that I’m spotting more and more often: journalists’ increasing use of the word “decline” when they mean “refuse”.

The market for disingenuous financial euphemisms is booming. Simply take a positive-sounding word and simply precede it with a suffix such as “down”, “negative”, “sub” or “under”.