Living on Writer's Block

Daily writing prompt

What is a word you feel that too many people use?

View all responses

One of the writing prompts I received recently was the question “What is a word you think too many people use?”

The short answer is “Too many to count.”

As in, there are so many words we overuse these days. And I am not going to act like I am exempt from this rebuke, because I use them all the time myself.

‘Sorry.’ How often do people say they’re ‘sorry,’ but they never truly mean it? Let me put in a slightly different way, have you ever been walking on the sidewalk, or in the store, when someone abruptly cuts in front of you with their cart, or zooms unannounced right past you on their bicycle… or scooter… or whatever electronic ‘hoverboard’ laziness-enabling-device they have? If they say ‘sorry’ at all, do they sound sincere, or they just casually flick a (slightly bored and contemptuous) glance over their shoulder at you, and quickly snap out ‘sorry’ like it’s actually your fault for being in their way? (As is to say, ‘it’s more important here that I get past you through the door first, rather than I be polite and mind my manners and let you pass first since you got here first’ or, in the case of the one on the hoverboard, almost to say ‘look at this idiot who’s walking, can’t they afford this super-cool, expensive thing I’VE got? gosh how lame to be them.’)

‘I don’t know.’ How often do lazy teenagers use this phrase to get out of answering their parents’ questions? (Looking in a mirror here…) How often do they use this phrase so that they can just continue, on autopilot, and make everyone else around them do their thinking for them? The truth is, we do know, we just frequently choose to ignore the fact that we know so that we can get out of having to do work. For example, suppose Bill is sitting on the couch and playing video games when his mother comes in and says, ‘Bill, where’s your brother’s backpack?’ Bill, who knows the backpack is sitting on the chair beside his brother’s desk a few rooms away, is too lazy to get up and get it for his mother, so instead he fakes ignorance and says ‘I don’t know.’ (Ironically, often enough this only results in his mother making him get up and help her look anyway.)

‘Literally.’ Everyone knows this one. ‘So I was hanging out with Lisa the other day and we were walking in the mall when she literally dropped her Starbucks-” STOP, STOP, stop. What on earth do we mean, ‘literally’? It’s not like she would ‘figuratively’ drop the Starbucks. She couldn’t do anything but ‘literally’ drop the drink. Why do we say this? I don’t know. Not gonna say I’m innocent, not remotely, but I do think we need to stop.

Any words to do with generations — i.e. ‘millennial’, ‘Gen-Z’, ‘Gen-X’, and all that other riff-raff. This delineation between generations is pointless; ‘Gen-Xers’ can be friends with ‘millennials’ just as easily (and possibly more to their benefit) as with people of their own generation. There’s a lot to be learned from those older than us, and despite the trite comments to ‘learn from those more experienced’ or ‘listen to your grandma’s stories’, we seldom listen to the advice and, I believe, have lost many jewels of wisdom over the years.

‘Legit’. I’m not talking about saying something is legit, I’m referring to how everyone says ‘and he legit just bombed the te-‘ No. Just no. We get it, he genuinely messed up, but why would you tell us if he didn’t? There is no point to using this word in every sentence. We know when you’re lying. We don’t need you to emphasize the fact that you’re telling the truth.

Finally, ‘like’. So, like, I don’t know why this is a thing but like everyone uses it, like, all the time and it’s like so annoying. …Do you get my point? It’s truly the most overused word in our culture right now.

I say all this, looking myself in the eye with the aid of a mirror. I myself nearly used ‘literally’ and ‘legit(imately)’ in all the wrong contexts while making this post. We don’t need these words, really-truly! Now I know we’re going to keep using them… because they’re so hard-wired into our brains and tongues that, at this point, we probably couldn’t get them out even if we tried.