Words have a power all their own (Photo credit: Lynne Hand)

Every generation has their own slang, words that only they understand, leaving their elders baffled. And every generation has a small number of words that are way overused. ‘Way’ is one of them, as is ‘cool’, ‘hip’ and ‘rad’. But these are overused words from previous generations. What are some of the words that are overused today? I can’t speak for anybody else, but the commonly used words that annoy me at the current time are:

• totally
• like
• epic
• random
• racist
• awesome (though I’m guilty of this one myself)
• right (as in I know, right?)
• you know
• to be honest
• literally (when misused)
• owned
• pawned
• cougar
• verbal use of internet abbreviations (like saying O-M-G- instead of Oh My God or W-T-F instead of What the Fuck?)

These are just a few of the things about today’s language that annoy me. What do you think? Am I being too picky? Do you have any pet language peeves?

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Categories: Blogs

Tags: english, language, Linguistics, slang, words