I am begging you, Internet, for a temporary ban on these words, phrases and writing tics.
I am not saying I haven’t used them, or that there is anything wrong with those who have.
What I am saying is: they have now crossed a line to being overused in a way that is, to me, a hallmark of the problem with internet writing (lack of editor means people don’t catch their own - usually unconscious - laziness with the English language).
Some of these were covered TWO YEARS AGO in Gawker’s list. Yet they persist.
If we could just take a break from them for a while so that they could stop feeling like…the literary version of a Beanie Baby, then people who legitimately and thoughtfully want to use them could without looking like…the literary version of people who drove around with a lot of Beanie Babies in the back windows of their cars.
- Woot
- Ramblings
- Musings
- Snark, Snarky, Snarking
- Rantings
- _____y Goodness
- Not so much
- I’m looking at you/talking to you, ________
- Lists. Punctuated. By. Periods. Rather. Than. Commas. Which. Makes. Them. Sound. Unbearably. Pretentious.
- _________tastic.
- Three word blog taglines like:
- Love. Music. Dream.
- Live. Hope. Laugh.
- Eat. Dream. Be.
- Happy dancing
- Squeeing
- Dieing from teh cuteness or however you are supposed to write it
- Excessive use of the solo sentence paragraph as a stylistic departure from rest of writing but that is used to underscore the import of something that is, in fact, pretty much trivial and therefore does not need the DUN-DUN-DUN soap opera dramatics of the brief single sentence paragraph*:
So normally I am just so not the kind of person who is big on any kind of cheesy goodness. Um, lactose intolerance, anybody? I have to ration out my Lactaid pills and so I really have to think about how and when I’m going to be pushing the envelope, and at this point, it’s rare that anything is going to make the cut.
Until I tasted this new feta cheese.
I know what you are thinking, feta cheese? More like feet-a cheese! It smells gross…
- Sweet!
- Score!
- Peeps, deets (These are borderline, might actually almost be so ubiquitous as to be a battle not worth fighting AND are shorter in characters and therefore useful on Twitter.)
*The exception to this would be if, in general, you are actually making a conscious stylistic choice to write about the trivial as high drama, in which case, a) I hope you are good at it, that’s a tightrope act there, and b) this particular stylistic tic might be appropriate if it can be used to some kind of absurdist comic end.
