Annoying and Pretentious Terms & Figures of Speech
By N. Stephan Kinsella
http://www.stephankinsella.com/favorites/annoying.php
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stephan@stephankinsella.com
Last updated September 2004
Annoying/Pretentious
Quoting “Mr. Dooley”; Quoting Will Rodgers; Quoting Yogi Berra; Quoting Boswell and/or Samuel Johnson (especially the stupid one about what is impressive about a walking dog is not that he walks well but that he walks at all); Quoting Shakespeare and/or calling Shakespeare “the Bard”
Mentioning Alexis de Tocqueville’s “great” study of America
implode/implosion
Calling New York “‘the’ City”
Calling Philadelphia “Center” City
Soda; soda pop; pop
Willy-nilly; Hey-presto!
Fin de sičcle ("end of the century," the end of an era)
O without the h (O! what a lovely day!)
The Weathermen; The Black Panthers; Che Guivera; SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]
The underground railroad (this one always used to confuse me when I was a kid, I couldn’t understand how all the abolitionists during the War of Northern Aggression were able to build railroads underground without detection)
Civil War (as opposed to War of Northern Aggression; Second Revolutionary War; or War Between the States)
I pissed myself (instead of I pissed
on
myself).
Standing on line (instead of
in
line)
wiseacre; wise guy
puerile (very pretentious)
august (as an adjective)
realpolitick
ward politics/ward boss (usually when describing big beefy almost Mafia/Union-like guys like Dan Rostenkowski)
robber baron
social justice
jerry rig; jury rig
gender-neutral language
debutante
homophobe
Mentioning the alleged rock group Cream.
bunion (supposed to be something like a “corn” on your foot or something); corn (see bunion); ulcer; rheumatism; “the” rheumatism (as in, “I’ve got a case of the rheumatism”); “the” arthritis
“the calculus” (instead of “calculus”)
at university ("When I was at university...")
materiel (supplies for a war effort)
bull market; bear market; bumper crop
signal (a "signal" event); sea change
tilting at windmills
journeyman; yeoman’s work
obtain: as in, “When this condition obtains, then such-and-such will also be true.”
soi-disant (meaning self-styled; so-called--usually used disparagingly)
writ large (on a larger scale or in a more prominent manner
writ large
--
Times Literary Supplement
>)
nonpareil (having no equal; without compare)
tony (as adjective, “The tony club in downtown Manhattan.”)
hare, cock, and bitch for rabbit, rooster, and dog
franks (to describe hot dog wieners)
long in the tooth (meaning old)
hat trick (something to do with jocks and sports)
tarmac (short, apparently, for “tarmacadam,” an asphalt-like substance from which airport runways are made; who in the hell is supposed to know this? “The President stepped off Air Force One onto the tarmac and greeted reporters.”)
leftenant (instead of lieutenant!)
goodly (significantly large: CONSIDERABLE
)
smudge-pot (something used in tort cases for first year law students)
chowder (some Yankee wannabe-gumbo dish apparently)
sue for peace (negotiate, ask, for peace?)
hangdog (as in the “hangdog” looks (sad, dejected, sheepish) of Ross Geller’s character on Friends)
laureate (as in Nobel laureate)
hoi polloi (the general populace; the masses)
hoity-toity (marked by an air of assumed importance: HIGHFALUTIN)
beg to differ (“beg”? Isn’t that a little strong?)
“in the event”-as prepositional phrase, instead of “in any event” or “as it turned out”
must needs (as in, “I must needs do this”)
should instead of would (as in “I should think that you would want to go to the theater”)
mortar-board (as in the top part of a graduation cap, like I’m supposed to know that)
unawares (without warning: suddenly, unexpectedly. “It caught me unawares.”)
man of letters (“Edmund Wilson was a man of letters.” First, who the hell was Edmund Wilson? Second, what the hell is a man of letters?)
stay tuned (who even knows anymore that a TV
has
a tuner?)
gaol (the British English spelling of “jail”)
vouchsafe (to give by way of reply
)
alarum (a call to arms
cohort (a group of individuals having a statistical factor (as age or class membership) in common in a demographic study
)
pyjamas (instead of pajamas)
catsup (instead of ketchup)
waldo (as in a “doo-hickey” or “thingamabob”)
broker a deal/honest broker
ballyhooed; much-ballyhooed; long-ballyhooed
vaunted or much-vaunted
wag (noun: as in a commentator or pundit or gossip: “As one wag put it recently, ...”)
writ large
nod (as in, give a nod to...)
shuffle off this mortal coil (i.e., die)
worry a bone (a dog chewing/playing with a bone)
let slip the dogs of war (“slip”?)
familiar (noun: as in, companion, or member of household of a high official)
own, used to mean “acknowledge”, as in, “I own I did not know that”
in fine, meaning, “in short”
weapon for gun
re-furbish
bids fair (“seems likely”, as in, “Kenneth Starr’s report bids fair to become a classic, bawdy epic.”)
apparatchik (a member of a Communist apparat; an official blindly devoted to superiors or to the organization. What the hell is an apparat? Why are we presumed to know Russian terms now?)
pleonastic (redundant; pleonasm: the use of more words than those necessary to denote mere sense (as in “the man he said”) : redundancy
antinomy (1: a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles; 2 : a fundamental and apparently unresolvable conflict or contradiction “antinomies of beauty and evil, freedom and slavery”)
photomicrograph (instead of: microphotograph)
piping hot
strapping (as in strapping young man)
jejune (whatever it means)
manque
Cool terms
hapless (also: witless, and half-wit)
shrapnel
morsel
cellar door
scatterbrained
copasetic
epistemology
orangutan
What up?
ergonomic
“walking papers”--as in when your wife tells you if you screw up again she will sign your walking papers
dint, as in by dint of his effort he succeeded
high dudgeon (this is a really cool one!)
red-ass; I’ve got a case of the red-ass; open up a can of whup-ass (as in, “If you don’t stop it I’m gonna open up a can of whup-ass on ya’).
screed
frenetic
nodule
laconic; bucolic
epiphany; sublime; sanguine; sensual
anvil; mortar & pestle; cordite (i.e., smell of gunpowder)
apocalyptic; ragnarok; armageddon; gotterdammerung (all synonyms for the apocolypse)
abomination; doppelganger (double, twin); atavistic (primal, primitive)
spreadable; splayed; splendid; scrumptious; resplendant
stolid
plug; lump
vainglory
idiot savant
hirsute (hairy)
truth be told; in truth
upshot
stillborn/stillbirth (it’s just so descriptive!)
malevolent (you got your “mal” in there for “evil”, you got your “vol” in there for voluntary action or intentionality, you got it all!)
baleful (mean, yellow eyes), doleful (sad doelike eyes)
***
putter (as in puttering around the house)
slake, quench (slake or quench your thirst)
nit pick
sabre-rattling
well-nigh (The grass needed mowing as it was well-nigh up to my knees.)
swash-buckling (but what is a swash, and why would you buckle it?)
cunning (as in, you’re a cunning linguist; or, better yet, Hegel’s “the cunning of reason”)
brisance (the shattering effect of an explosion)
frisson (a brief moment of emotional excitement; shudder, thrill)
cavil (“beyond cavil”; cavil = a trivial and frivolous objection, or to raise a trivial objection)
purport, purportedly
terra cotta. Terra firma.
cul-de-sac
wainscoting (wood or stuff on bottom part of walls)
crimson; scarlet
nudge
hustle & bustle
cogitate
ennui (noun: a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction; boredom)
Molten
smelted
clack
clamber
trenchant
toddle
toddy
Miscellaneous
You can re-group, but can you group?
Re-furbish, and re-vamp; but furbish? vamp?
Nonplussed; plussed
ruthless; ruth...ful?
commonplace: noun or adjective?
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