We all have opinions, and many of them are about words or constructions that we dislike intensely.* But I, as a professional editor, must keep my idiosyncratic preferences under restraint. Thus it becomes necessary to rationalize my crotchets to give them some color of authority.
Take, for example, ongoing. To you it's likely innocuous; to me it is irritating because the context is almost always clear and the word is redundant. "Tempers flare in the ongoing political debate." "Businesses lose customers because of the ongoing construction." You know that debate and construction are in progress. The writer inserts the unnecessary ongoing to tell the reader, "This is really, really current." For the same reason, currently can frequently be deleted without harm.
Or tout. To my ear, the word carries unsavory echoes of racetrack slang, someone brazenly promoting. It can suggest boasting or bragging. I see it regularly when public officials and business interests ballyhoo some project that is going to cost taxpayers a bundle. The same overtone, that someone may be attempting to put something over on you, adheres to the synonyms boost and plug. I usually substitute praise or promote. Tout gained a lingering vogue among journalists because it is short and handy in a headline.
And while we are considering relics of 1940s tabloid journalism, let's not forget blast, which does not usually involve dynamite, nitroglycerin, or Semtex, but merely means "criticize." OK, sometimes "denounce." The verb nix still occasionally crops up, though Walter Winchell has lain beneath the sod these five decades and more. (Once--I tell you this from direct experience--I encountered a story submitted for publication that said someone had been "fingered in the heist.") But to be fair, it has been a while since I have seen lambaste.)
I despair that writers will ever repent of the pleonasms mass exodus and safe haven.
Uh, you do understand how they are redundant, right?
Author as a noun suggests a degree of prestige, as in Wolcott Gibbs's advice to editors, "Always respect an author's style, if he is an author and has a style." As a verb, to say that someone authored a memo or report or some other routine piece of prose carries a smell of pretension, especially since wrote is a nice, compact, straightforward little word.
Then there are the usually empty words that writers use to puff up their subjects: influential, powerful, incredible (often for overpriced or vulgarly expensive housing), prestigious. Trust me, the Nobel and the Pulitzer do not need you to signal that people think they are important. And using it for the Top Advertising Salesman in the Tri-State Area This Year will not much elevate the award in the reader's mind.
You may wish to chime in with this roster, explaining your reasons. Feel free. But be advised that if you litter the comments section with unsupported dicta, I will delete freely.
*I wrote a little book, Bad Advice: The Most Unreliable Counsel Available on Grammar, Usage, and Writing, in which I point out that some views you may hold are bogus: Yes, you can use that to refer to human beings, irregardless is indeed a word, singular they is swell ... It's a cheap paperback. Get informed.
