Worst modifier ever

Dunce cap and a dope slap for R. J. Ellory.

Stop saying "as per usual." Please.

Bad enough that phrasings like as per your instructions instead of per your instructions are becoming ever more common, but for the love of Strunk and White, this is just horrible:

... you will be able to read them on your Kindle as per usual ...

As usual. As usual. As usual.

Not that Erez Zukerman is solely guilty. (RIGHT, ROY?). He's just the latest.

[Added] vacuumslayer weighs in.

I suppose I should be glad they didn't say they were Working Hard to bring me this Awesome feature

While I think Mozy is a fine company ...

Dear Mozy Customer,

We’re pleased to announce an exciting new way of managing your Mozy account and accessing your files. Effective later today, when you log into mozy.com, you'll go directly to your files.

Increasingly, our MozyHome customers have told us that they come to the Mozy website to quickly access their files. We've facilitated this by updating the default "log in" location as your backed up and Stash files, instead of the "Account Home" details page. [...]

... I do not think saving me one mouseclick is "exciting."

First time I've ever approved of the use of quote marks for emphasis

Latest piece of spam had this subject line:

"Must read" for Brendan Keefe:

Talk is cheaper

Every software announcement on the planet, these days:

We are excited that we have been workinghard on our awesome platform that helps you write great apps.

And don't even get me started on that other one.

---

P.S. The title was going to be My Kingdom for an Understatement but … yeah,

A (belated) award to Hendrick Hertzberg

From the Calling a Spade a Spade Department, in alliance with the Day Late Dollar Short Division of our UpToTheMinuteNews™ Service, for his hilarious report of a couple weeks ago on the Iowa caucus results:

One by one, all the other claimants to the title of No. 1 “movement” and/or Christianist conservative had peaked and plummeted …

It's useful to distinguish them from the millions of regular Christians, is the point.

+ + + + +

I first encountered the term on The Daily Dish, and Wikipedia says … oh, hey, look!

Not to be confused, indeed.

Anyway, Wikipedia says that Safire gave credit to Sully for the coinage. Or at least the reissue. Reading that piece, though, I see that I am also only about seven years behind in congratulating Mr. Hertzberg. Sorry, Rick.

And see Urban Dictionary. Guess the term has become more mainstream than I had thought. God bless us everyone.

SOME might say I already own a few copies

Swiped from Better Book Titles. A truly hilarious site.

(h/t: Charli Carpenter, whose post has more of her favorites, plus some links to serious thoughts about picking titles in many walks of literary life)

I applaud an hamster ...

... because that's how I always remembered that classic Python line (which involved elderberries also), but people, please, it's not an FAQ, it's a FAQ.

First, if there were ever an initialism that is indisputably an acronym, it's FAQ, and second, saying it as a word carries the sense that it is a thing (a list, a page, what have you). Saying "an FAQ" makes you think you should say "an F … A … Q" which then makes you think you should really expand the letters into the words they stand for, which makes you think the abbreviation needs to be proceeded by "a list of."

Do you want to pronounce each letter? No, you want to say things like "Just the FAQs, Jack."

Plus, think of the energy savings from omitting all those incorrect Ns.

Other than that, TweetProgress.us is a nice idea and a fine-looking website.

It's Hardly Working For Me

Apropos of nothing, except that it has been grating on me even more than usual lately, I wish to register my irritation with what has become an all too common expression.

I really have had it with this: no one ever describes him- or herself as working anymore. It is always working hard.

It's reached the point where adding the modifier diminishes the verb. We are not fairly amused.

Either stop doing that, or if we're to surrender to the inevitable, that the cliché has become an idiom, let's just be honest with ourselves that we've cheapened yet another phrase and eliminate the space: We have been workinghard on our latest project.

__________

[Added] Also: working closely with. Ugh. Prefer working with.

Tinpicking: What's The Difference?

I want to compliment a tiny matter. Please pardon my neologism. I couldn't think of an antonym for nitpick.

I was just reading Jeff Atwood's post, Keeping Time on the PC, which talks about the inaccuracies of the clocks built into computers. (Believe it or not, it's quite interesting.)

At one point, he says (emph. mine):

There's a clever PC time drift graph on this webpage derived from the difference between JavaScript time on the client, and the server time the webpage was sent to the client.

Thank you for not saying "differential," Jeff.

I have a special loathing for people who use differential when they mean difference. This is even worse than utilizing utilize instead of using use. It's as bad as saying "The boss met with Joe and I" or "The student was disinterested in the lecture."

To my mind, differential should be reserved for discussions involving a particular aspect of calculus or a specific part of a car's rear axle. The error probably started with suits and sales dweebs. Whatever the origin, it has infected all manner of telepundits and spokesdrones. For the past few years, differential seems to have been the sole page in the Power Word of the Day calendars belonging to TV sports commentators; e.g., "If they kick a field goal here, there's still a four-point differential in the score."

There is a difference between accepting our language as a living thing and insisting on precision. Kudos to Jeff for getting this right.

Spleen vented. Thank you for your attention.