![]() ![]() When a player keeps on missing or cocking up clear chances, is he wasteful? No, he’s ‘ profligate’.But are they ever just that? No, they’re often ‘lethargic’ or – bonus points here – ‘ lackadaisical’. When do you ever hear that outside football? (If only.) According to match commentators, they ‘ remonstrate’. Players and managers never seem to complain these days.Stripping this right back, there are words that drive me crazy, words only commentators seem to say. There are plenty of clichés that are trotted out in football circles – ‘handbags’, ‘early doors’, ‘there or thereabouts’ and about a hundred others – just as there are in certain other sports. (“They’re a massive club.”) What I mean is the words that are unnecessarily complicated. (As in “They’re a top, top Spanish team” or “He’s a top, top centre-forward”.) Or the use of ‘massive’ in the way that lots of people use it today, meaning something more than ‘very big’. I’m not talking about some of the football language – like the use of ‘top, top’ meaning ‘very good’. And you see it in action with football commentators. And don’t get us started on ‘leverage’.īut there’s another example of how ridiculous this approach is. Executives are prone to want to say ‘utilise’ when a simple ‘use’ will do. I mean avoiding unnecessarily complicated language when a simple word or phrase will do. Sometimes it’s hard to avoid jargon, unsurprisingly so for B2B content in quite a few industries, but I’m not talking about that here. ![]()
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