More meaningless phrases that are used unthinkingly. I hate the lot of them!

We are closed today/unable to provide the service you’ve paid for, etc. We apologise for the inconvenience.

The hell you do. You couldn’t care less about what your withdrawal of your service means to your customers or you’d have done everything in your power to prevent it. And to suppose I’m only mildly ‘inconvenienced’ by your slipshod ways, not to mention your glib apology, is to underestimate the trouble you’ve put me to.

‘Your reaction is abuse’. 

Anything remotely assertive is now regarded as abuse. The term has been degraded the extent that those who are genuinely abused – physically, sexually or emotionally – are now on a par with those dealing with a dissatisfied customer in a shop or an obstructive bureaucrat down the phone (assuming you can speak to a real person these days). Of course, it’s best to be calm and civil when trying to resolve a problem, but a little forcefulness is occasionally necessary. These days you’ll have strayed into ‘abuse’ if you make your point with anything other than submissive meekness. As Spectator columnist Mark Mason put it (after I originally drafted this post), a claim of abuse ‘has become a go-to argument of the grievance generation. Express the slightest irritation with them for being irritating and you’re the one in the wrong’. (Is this post abusive? Probably.)

Shit, as in ‘I’ll just collect my shit’ or ‘I need to get my shit together’. The imagery is gross – you do know what shit is, don’t you? – and if you have such low regard for your belongings or your thoughts maybe you should think twice and about telling us about it. There are plenty of other decent and less revolting words for your stuff and your psychological state and to aver them for ‘shit’ is downright lazy

And while I’m having still ranting, let me have a go at the f word. I’m sick to death of it. I do occasionally use it myself, particularly in totally rational disputes with technology, but I get weary of hearing it in snatches of conversation I hear while walking in the street, where every other word is the f-word or one of its derivatives. It is used by parents in the presence of their children and, worse, when addressing them. I deplore its use on TV and in films where it’s added to give more force to dialogue or insight into how a character’s feeling. Any half-decent actor could and should convey emotion or urgency or whatever without the need for superfluous swear words. ‘I want you out of my life, ‘ delivered by a competent actor conveys more personal anguish and naked pain than ‘I want you out of my f***ing life,’ which conveys only anger and reflects the scriptwriter’s societal conditioning that compels him or her to include the f word because that’s what people in the street do. Scriptwriters need to trust their actors far more than they do and cut out the needless profanity. Shakespeare never found the need to include it in any of his 37 plays. ‘Is this a dagger I see before me’ would have been robbed of its power if the bard had seen fit to stick a ‘fucking’ in there somewhere. Likewise, comedians who think a line is made funnier by adding the f word to it; if the line is funny, it’s funny without it. If it’s not funny, adding fuck won’t make it funny. Let’s have less of the f word and more considered writing and genuine funniness.

Rant over.