It seems like a new word is added to this list everyday. Let’s see how many of us are of like mind!
What overused/misused words no longer mean anything?
r/AskMen
It seems like a new word is added to this list everyday. Let’s see how many of us are of like mind!
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It seems like a new word is added to this list everyday. Let’s see how many of us are of like mind!
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Transphobic. I’m so tired of this word that I feel immune to it whenever the topic comes up.
Unique. It’s a binary qualifier, something is either unique or it isn’t. There’s no such thing as more/less or very/not very unique.
I’m kindof a Fuddy Duddy when it comes to new terms. People are saying “That’s Mid”, my understanding is that it’s Middle or Average, but I think people are saying it as “This is lame” or “Low Quality”
Also people using the word Based in contexts that are definitely not Based.
People throwing around the term Liberal for meaning anyone who isn’t conservative.
There’s lots of other examples but I’ll leave mine at 3.
“Low-key”
Though I’m not sure it ever meant much. It just sounds edgy.
Fascist, Nazi, Commie, antisemite, homophobic, racist, islamophobic, various list of mental disorders, literally, leftist, far right, snowflake….I could go on.
Politics suck
Full accountability
Gaslighting
All the made-up therapy words: gaslighting, tone policing, tone deaf, virtue signaling, etc
Trash words used by trash people emboldened by trash theories
Ick. Not like it had much or any meaning, but I’ve seen it used because the guy she was seeing microwaved his porkchops…so the same term that women are using to describe things like abusive or shitty person vibes is also being used for the pettiest non-issues ever brought to light. It lost all meaning before it even had it.
Just because you disagree with someone, that doesn’t make the other person a “Nazi.”
Stance. Camber has nothing to do with stance, that’s a oni camber build, while a car can be both a stance and oni camber build, most oni camber builds are not a stance build.
Also clean, if a car has visual mods beyond an oem optional lip kit and wheels it cannot be considered clean. Clean builds were in response to the modding style of the late 90s-early 00s over the top body kits, headlight/taillight conversions, neons everywhere, lambo doors builds. So your car with a body kit or a non-oem lip kit is will never be clean no matter how nice and well put together it is.
And on that note, body kit. If you are not removing the oem front and rear bumpers you do not have a body kit, you have a lip kit.
Yes I’m an old man yelling at clouds about car shit. But in real life I don’t really care because words meanings change over time, it’s one of the most fascinating parts of language, so I like to watch how it has happened in my biggest hobby for the last 3 decades
woke means anything Conservatives are afraid of (which is everything)
Therapy
Political attacks (Nazi, transphobe, racist, sexist, etc.), therapy terms (gaslighting, narcissistic, ick, etc.).
Those words had actual meaning until certain groups used them to label anyone they disagree with. The fatigue is real.
“Could” means only in somebody stupids imagination now.
N!gg@
Genocide. War sucks and it is really nasty (I’m a combat vet, so I speak from experience). But genocide has a very specific legal definition, and not every war that results in massive civilian deaths is a genocide.
You can have justifiable moral objections to actions taken in a war, but that alone doesn’t meet the criteria for genocide. It may not even meet the criteria for a war crime.
Anachronistic.
Space. My c level heard that one some where and every sentence he has to drop it. “in the X space, this is happening, the team working on the Y space…”. Dude, find a new word to over fucking use.
Self-care. Encompasses all natural human activities as well as socially derived ones. Took a shower, ate a meal, spent $6000 on clothes via credit card? All self-care! It can be used for basically any activity that self-gratifies or distracts from the actual bad state of the world. It’s like the “carbon footprint” of psychology, placing the onus of fixing one’s mental health on the individual rather than the very real (and ultimately addressable) systemic issues causing most of them.
Ocd
trauma and gaslighting
Literally
“Unprecedented,” has been wildly overused in the media for the past decade. I swear, somewhere between 2016-2020 the media just decided that nearly every damn new development had something unprecedented in it and sprinkled the use of that word into everything.
All words have meaning and misuse only changes that meaning.
Incel has to be the top
Incel used to be a shorthand for ‘Involuntary Celibate’, that’s it, no emotional connotation it was just a descriptor, not a label, but then everyone spammed this shit like they spam all the other cringe terms of ‘ist! Phobe! Bigot!’ Etc that it’s to the point people don’t even remember what it meant and people call married men incels, like okay
Full stop is annoying
Iconic
Epic
Fascist, racist, commie, pedophile
Unhinged, diabolical
Lowkey. People just lowkey stick it into any lowkey place they lowkey feel like it. Even making it into oxymorons. “I lowkey fucking love pizza!”. That’s not very lowkey.
Woke
Speaking out
Woke.
Pretty sure ‘woke’ just means ‘things that threaten my narrow world view’ these days.
Nazi. I got called that earlier today, and I’m literally a jew.
Literally
We don’t really use “apparently” properly anymore.
Racist
Misogynist, I see it thrown out there all the time and half of it is just someone not agreeing with said person.
Like I just see so many comments or statements that are just normal but yet there’s always someone throwing out that’s it’s internal misogynistic… like nooo Im just not a fan of chocolate ice cream WTF?
Christian as in “I’m a Christian”. Whatever definition someone uses, their practice of it almost certainly doesn’t jibe with the way Christianity is defined in the Bible.
Literally
“I’m super excited to [insert mundane business thing]”
Fucking hate it. Excited to be here? I’d rather take a cheese grater to my knob.
Actually
It is a nothing word, all it is is a written form of emphasizing
“Literally” is getting misused so often.
“I literally almost died” for something like choking on a little bit of water from your bottle. It’s such a pet peeve for me
Gaslighting
“Awesome”.
“Hi, my name is Mary.”
“Oh cool. That’s awesome!”
Ok. How?
Actually, Basically, very, facetious,
Cringe. It used to mean a very strong unpleasant feeling that makes your body physically react. Bow it just means anything that is slightly embarrassing.
Goat
“Like”
You mean actually. Not literally. No one means literally.
I wonder why people are so upset about the language drift behind “literally”.
People are acting like “literally” is their word baby, and people mutilated it.
Privileged. To me anytime someone tells me im privileged, I hear, “You should feel bad for having it better then others.”
I even have to stop my self from saying privilege and switched to saying fortunate.
Literally. I fucking hate the way it’s used 3 times in every sentence these days.
Literally. Americans in particular tends to use it, where they mean figuratively. And now they don’t seem to know how to express the distinction between the two of those.
Radical
Literally? Literally.
Literally.
Patriot. Man, post-9/11, patriot was everyone who did their job and didn’t take a shit on a soldier’s lawn. Was like John Mulaney’s description of the New York Post adjectives. “hero is anybody who does their job. ‘Hero teacher tutors kids after school’. Yeeeeeaah”. Let me introduce you to my neighbor. Great guy true patriot. “Oh did he face sure demise and still stand proud for his country and ideals?” Nah, but he has a flag pole in his front yard with some mums around the base.
Woke
“fuck”.
It’s so overused, it’s ridiculously not classy.
woke
people telling on themselves in here. they still mean what they actually mean in appropriate contexts but what pisses me off most is psychobabble/therapyspeak. mental health is not some social media trend and its so fucking offensive to water down important terms for “clout” online. some people actually suffer from trauma, you forgetting to buy tickets to a show you wanted to see isn’t trauma. it’s one of those things that makes me want to immediately write off a person. immature, entitled, annoying people do this.
Woke, but I suspect it never actually meant anything and was always just a right wing scape goat.
Discrimination is the act of judging something for some quality and acting differently depending of said quality. For example, we discriminate rotten food and fresh food, we dump the rotten food and eat the fresh food. Discrimination became a loaded word, roughly meaning “being a bigot”. For example, I’ve seen people say that affirmative action is not discrimination, but it absolutely is in the correct sense of the word.
Anything with ‘phobe’ at the end
Awesome
GOAT. Instead of “greatest of all time” it just basically means someone you like. I drives me nuts when people say stuff like “Lebron and Curry are the current GOATs for sure”. By definition, there can ever only be one GOAT in any field.
Literally
Unpopular opinion: Incel.
That word has been thrown around so many times (even on Reddit) that it distracts from actual misogynistic haters of women with violent tendencies.
Gamer? —> Incel
Porn addict? —> Incel
Loser with no sexual experience? —> Incel
Homophobe? —> Incel
Conservative, but not a full-on Nazi yet? —> Incel
You’re an incel, I’m an incel, everyone that so-and-so doesn’t like is an incel! How exciting! /s
It’s like Godwin’s law that people are talking about on the Internet.
Lots of medical and academic terms that have been taken up by social media; sometimes because of overuse and sometimes because of misuse. The ones I find most over-used are gaslighting, narcissist, misogynist and toxic masculinity (and the often co-occurring mansplaining and manspreading). The most egregious misuses tend to be diagnoses (particularly mental health ones) and theory.
There are a whole batch of political ones as well but that’s a never ending list.
TERF. It means “trans exclusionary radical feminist”. They keep calling random people TERFs.
Sweetheart, I’m no feminist, believe me.
I agree about the mental health labelling on everyone and everything. Everyone you meet who does something selfish or arrogant is a narcissist.
Facist, snowflake, racist, sexist, incel, misandrist, Misogynist, transphobe, nazi, woke, SJW etc
I can go on and on. People use these words where they make no sense just as a quick Insult.
And both sides pull this ridiculous crap.
Iconic.
“Epic” and “literally” have been so overused they’ve become practically meaningless. Same with “literally,” which people use to mean anything but literal. It’s like words are on a fast track to losing all impact.
Therapy speak, meaning terms like gaslightining, trauma, emotional intelligence, anxiety etc. It seems like any time specific academic terminology starts leaking into the mainstream, it swiftly loses all meaning as it starts to get spammed on social media in the most nuanceless, neaderthal-brained way. The same thing happened to feminist terminology, philosophy, psychology etc. and it’s going to keep happening.
–literally
–basically
–narcissist
–toxic
–racist
–sexist
–misogynist
–abuse (abused, abuser, abusive)
Literally
Narcissist. I’ve noticed a lot of women overuse the hell out of that term now and women who basically don’t want to be in a reciprocal relationship use it to describe men who have healthy boundaries and reasonable expectations of commitment.
For example: my ex claims I’m a narcissist because I told her while I didn’t mind her going out with her friends, giving out her personal contact info/Instagram to guys was a hard no for me. Told her if she wanted to keep her options open we shouldn’t be seeing eachother (literally wouldn’t bother her the entire time she would go out ).
Thats a healthy boundary. I wouldn’t give my info out either and it’s not like I was asking anything extreme.
“Far Right” is now really overblown. It’s basically anyone who doesn’t 100% think, act, and vote like me is now “Far Right”
Cope
Something that’s overused and holds little meaning today is “I’m sorry”. It is used so often and used by many people that don’t even mean it. I often tell people to stop saying it because it holds no value. The difference between I’m sorry and I apologize, when you apologize you take responsibility and work to make sure that you don’t do something similar again which caused you to apologize.
I don’t necessarily mind that these words have wildly different or conflicting meaning depending on school of thought or context, but how often people insist there is only one true meaning means 1) two people of different schools of thought often have extreme difficulty in talking because they are not aligned on a definition, and 2) they don’t acknowledge or appreciate the full history of the word where multiple conflicting definitions exist across context.
God
Capitalism
“Peak” is a problem.
Any word that has become popular in the last decade
Literally
The Internet loves to learn new words together and then everyone over-uses those words, and then I start to dislike the words in question.
For instance: cringe, lore, ick, and there are other I’ll recall throughout the day.