I like where you're headed with the Corpspeak @Tenderiser. To this list I will add: "Spearhead" "Offline" as in, "let's talk about that offline." "Empower", chosen specifically to make someone want to do something they wouldn't already want to do. Ex) "Feel empowered to take over those spreadsheets."
Got to confess 'my ride or die' means absolutely nothing to me either. What does it mean? Am I too old. Wrong continent? What?
slang that takes a ugly word and turns it into something 'good' - that's sick! - I can imagine the dirty looks given in the hospital over some dingleberry using this phrase. Another I hated - Sa-weet. You had to say it that way too - not sweet but Sa-weet. For some reason that nice word brought out the hostility in me. I so wanted to bash the person saying it.
I just burst out laughing at that; it's so apt. I had to fill out my self-appraisal form today and one of the questions was "how empowered do you feel in your role?"
Someone from a contract-finding company came in to give me a demonstration on their product a few weeks ago and, several times, he used the phrase "when we find a contract that hits your sweet spot." I... just... no. Our big boss dude uses "the last period of time" or "the next period of time." Like: "Over the last period of time profits have been up." What does that even mean?
Big boss dude also does "in the fullness of time". To be honest it's only really tautologies that bug me
That means if you specify the period of time properly you can show an increase in profits, but he's not going to tell you what the period is so that if he's challenged on it he can use any arbitrary period of time that backs him up
You'd hate patent law. "Comprised of" or "Comprising" is standard patent terminology in the U.S. that has a very specific legal meaning, and if you edit it out you could really screw up your client's patent
Let's keep that discussion to a separate post in the debate forum. It'll just derail this thread to the point where mods have to step in.
Do they mean the same thing in that context? I'm fine with "comprising", it's just the tautological "comprised of". Legal writing has tripled my workload. Because of the way contracts capitalise certain words, my colleagues now do it in non-legal writing. I can easily spend an hour a day removing unnecessary capitals from words like "project", "client" and "contract."
Yeah, in the context of patent law the phrases are interchangeable, though I just use "comprising." Don't Germans capitalize many nouns? In a legal contract, a capitalized word generally (though not always) indicates that it is a defined term, so people will know to look at the definitions section or somewhere in the document for a specific definition of that word.
I think 'comprised of' is okay, when you're listing a bunch of things that, taken together, form a whole. "Our group is comprised of people who do the tango, people who write their names backwards underwater, and a few people who bark like dogs when their toes get stomped on."
You're right, I'm thinking of "comprises of" which I think is always wrong. But now I'm doubting myself...
Please stop that right away. When I see it in the forum, I assume a twelve-year-old who's working on a fantasy trilogy.
"So" is a discourse marker. I've probably seen it start a sentence more in literary fiction than I have in fantasy. Seamus Heaney, in his introduction to Beowulf, points out a use of "so" in that context: "Conventional renderings of hwæt, the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with ‘lo’, ‘hark’, ‘behold’, ‘attend’ and – more colloquially – ‘listen’ being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, ‘so’ it was: So. The Spear-Danes in days gone byand the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns." I think "so" at the beginning of a sentence often serves a similar purpose. And it is worth noting that Heaney, in the text of his own introduction (i.e. where he isn't translating the poem or anything like that, but just writing conversationally) even uses "so" to begin his own sentences on more than one occasion
