This has prompted me to start a thread I have pondered for a while now.
Words that irk for good or no reason, bizarre or novel usages, tortured language, etc.
Not linking to individual posts on other boards would be civilised, but corporations etc are of course fair game.
Oh, and also delightful expressions, slang and the like that one happens upon.
Why do I hate ‘medley’ so much in a food, and particularly vegetable, context?
“…served with a medley of [seasonal] vegetables”
tends to mean some diabolical combination of the following:
We don’t change the menu that often
It’s what we have to hand
Hey, we can boil them all together!
Call it a ‘medley’, and we can apply the ‘it dunnarf sound posh’ supplement
It’s a nasty, cheap, aspirational-from-a-low-base, lazy little word. Mind you, in this context, ‘a selection of seasonal’ makes me almost as cross.
I think I have Serious Issues with language about food. Of which you are liable to hear more, much more, you fortunate people.
Mercifully I was spared that particular pronunciation in Canada. But they did tend to splutter that things that simply had to be accepted because they had - actually - happened were … yes, I don’t need to go on. And we’re only talking about the delay of the shipping of their household goods, here. Possible shipwrecks, but nobody drownded.
Medley doesn’t hurt my sensibilities so badly when it is an arrangement of bits of music from various sources, I feel. Almost jazz, sometimes.
Also, I think it is the old word for one of those swimming races in which the entrants swim four different strokes up and down a swimming-bath. Like a one-person relay race.