Citizens of corporations continuously expose one another to venomous verbalism in their perpetual efforts to carry themselves as linguistically sound and up to date, like I am doing now. I recently started maintaining a list of distinct patterns in such occurrences. I am hardly immune to such crassness. I simply hope to cut down on at least those patterns that I have identified. Today, the news about the words that Americans find most annoying spurred me into venting my peeves in phraseology, and hence I am making this list public.
The root construction: When I had queried him he had said that he would second to the same.
1. Perfect Tense: makes perfect sense. I had told you that simple past is for simpletons and perfect is for perfectionists. All corporations strive for perfection, and so must their employees.
2. The PrepositionPost: We love prepositions. The correctness of their usage is unclear and nobody gives a damn how and where you use them “anyways”. They are easier than adjectives. They add to the word count in short mails and allow us to speak longer, without adding anything. I have already heard the most ridiculous example that I could ever come across, viciously wished to gag the speaker’s mouth with a butt plug, and I still do: Let us sit together and close it out.
3. Woulden Words: We would prefer “would” to “will” because the former is longer and the latter would imply greater clarity.
4. The Same Shame: “The same” is considered to be the superior, hence preferred, sibling of words like “it” and “that”. Did you ever use these words? If not, please do the same.
5. Query: According to dictionaries “query” is synonymous to “question”, but it is (used to be, at least) such an impersonal word. I don’t query people, I ask them questions. I query search engines. Querying colleagues must have started among “software engineers”. Do you have any other queries?
Update on 21st Oct, 2009: I ended my request to a customer care service provider asking them to acknowledge the mail. The savant on the other side replied, “We wish to affirm that we are in receipt of your mail and we shall be reverting at the earliest.” Since recovering from an instantaneous bout of apoplexy I have been trying to recall the last time someone wrote, “We received your mail and will get back to you soon.”