A friend highlighted "icon" and "iconic" as the latest label to be applied to almost anything that is in the slightest memorable or celebrity. Of course, Michael Jackson's untimely death brought out the "iconic" status for him. Joanna Lumley was an icon a few weeks abo. But since it had been mentioned to me by Carol, I'm hearing it all too frequently.
Another Twitter acquaintance was irritated by the frequency of the word "absolutely," particularly when it was usually an affirmative response to a question, where a simple "yes" would definitely suffice. He would time Radio 4's Today programme to see how long it go before hearing an "absolutely."
Of course, there's a load of management-speak weasle-wording and the one that springs to mind, possibly because it is heard so often, is "going forward" - used when the speaker means "in [the] future."
And I've only recently noticed the increasingly frequent occurrence of "key" (and old Fordism, in my experience) when the speaker means "important" in a phrase such as "this is key to our success."
And finally (for the time being), a rather geeky irritant. I belong to a photography 'forum' type of website, where many of the contributors claim that they have made some adjustments to their photograph using "CS4".
Oh, no they haven't! They have done their tweaking in Adobe Photoshop. And the version they are using is from the Adobe Creative Suite, version 4; CS4. As there are several other programs in the Creative Suite, using the term CS4 is meaningless, as it could be version 4 of any number of software products within the suite. Stop it! Please.
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