Pet peeves

One pet peeve of mine is the expression “one of the two or three most.” That’s what you say when you want to sound more specific than “one of the most,” but without being specific specific!  When I see the expression “one of the most” I assume it’s in the top three anyway, rather than fourth or fifth.

Another one is the American expression “left-liberal.” While “the conservative right” is redundant, “the liberal left” is an oxymoron.

Another is the misuse of the adverb “literally.” It’s supposed to mean, “This sounds like hyperbole, but it’s straightforward.” But people add it to hyperbole just to give it emphasis, as in “Kim Kardashian was literally drowning in silk!” No, she wasn’t.

I also dislike redundancy.  Some years back the Chile correspondent for The New York Times insisted that the nation before Pinochet seized power was “a backward banana republic.”  Not only is this a wrongheaded analysis—Chile before 1973 was one of Latin America’s more liberal, stable societies—it’s redundant! (How can a banana republic not be backward?) This is a case of rhetorical redundancy, better suited to The New York Post.

I found another example in The New Yorker.  That magazine used to have high standards, but it slipped badly after Tina Brown took over as editor.  I remember one article mentioning that a presidential candidate was “soundly thumped.” Can you be thumped unsoundly?  This is the sort of redundancy that the old magazine would have caught!  But it’s more a case of “trying too hard” redundancy.

Other pet peeves of mine are movie cliches.  Like when a character learns important information by eavesdropping from the other side of a closed window. (Have you ever tried to listen to a conversation through a pane of glass?  Near-impossible!) Or when one character starts saying “Let me explain…” but the other character cuts him off with “I’m not listening!”  In real life you should just launch into your explanation right away and not give anyone the chance to refuse to listen….  And of course there’s the young woman who’s being pressured into doing something she doesn’t want to do (usually involving sex), but she’s too weak to say no!

I hate TV cliches even more.  Like “the forgotten breakup.” Two characters breaking up can be a nice dramatic way to end an individual episode.  But the show’s structure may require them to stay together, and reconciliation is a lot harder to write.  So what the writers do is wait a couple of episodes and then have the two of them back together with no explanation!  In other words, they forget that there’s been a breakup… (I’ve seen that one in even the best shows.) Or an episode where one character has a promising opportunity that’ll mean leaving town and no longer being part of the group.  Unless the character’s really being written out, however, he’ll end up staying after all, often for reasons that aren’t very convincing.  Another is one is having a character behave like a bigger jerk than he usually is, to the point of being out of character, all so he can suffer comeuppance later on…

I also dislike movies and TV shows where the foreign dialogue isn’t subtitled and you have to try to guess what they’re saying!  I liked the original miniseries of Shogun back in 1980, but I would have liked it more with subtitles for all the Japanese talk.  Unfortunately, movie studios and TV networks assume that the mass audience hate to read more than they hate confusion…

And I can’t omit micromanagers from any list of my pet peeves!  But I mustn’t continue all day.