Let’s say goodbye to those irritating English clichés

Do you very often catch yourself peppering your conversations or extemporaneous remarks with the expressions “with all due respect” or “to be completely honest with you”? If so, and if you happen not to know it yet, be aware that these expressions two had ranked third and fourth, respectively, among the most irritating phrases in the English language. This was the finding of a worldwide survey conducted by the London-based Plain English Campaign in 1994 among 5,000 respondents in 70 countries.

Since then, in my English-usage columns and books, I have made it my advocacy to help curb the overuse of irritating English clichés. As part of my campaign, I specifically gave a lowdown on “with all due respect” and “to be honest with you” in an essay that I wrote for The Manila Times at about this time in 2005. I have decided to post that essay in this week’s edition of the Forum to give fresh impetus to that campaign.

I trust that after reading the essay below, most everybody will hold his or her tongue in check every time it’s tempted to let loose another “with all due respect” or “to be honest with you.” Frankly, our English will be much better off without the first, and it will sound more honest and straightforward with “frankly” instead of the second. (October 30, 2010)    

With respect to “with all due respect”

It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that “with all due respect” ranked third and “to be (completely) honest (with you)” fourth in a 1994 worldwide survey among the most irritating phrases in the English language.¹ These two phrases are obviously battered from severe overuse, and the Plain English Campaign survey of 5,000 respondents in 70 countries simply reflected this fact.

We can get an even clearer picture of this overuse by skimming the written and spoken usage of these two phrases that have made it to the World Wide Web. In a check I made with Google at about this time in 2005, there were 1,720,000 hits for “with all due respect” and 592,000 hits for “to be honest with you” (this dropped to 14,700 hits for usage that adds “completely” to the phrase).² There is compelling evidence on the Web that lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, religious leaders, and broadcast talk-show hosts and guests are writing and uttering these two phrases so indiscriminately as to make them downright annoying to their readers or listeners.

In the Philippines, of course, we know very well that “with all due respect” is the preferred prefatory phrase of lawyers and bureaucrats—a disconcerting form of legalese or bureau­cratese—when contradicting someone of higher authority or social station or when about to present an offensive statement. Take the following court pleading: “With all due respect [italicization mine], the prosecution submits that the initial presentation of defense evidence in the plunder case may push through on 30 June 2004 notwithstanding the pendency of incidents, if any, before the Honorable Court…” The phrase can grate on the layman’s ears, but as a code of lawyerly manners or politesse, it helps temper the unpleasantness of the typically adversarial language used in court. Also, its use in judicial proceedings has been hallowed by time, so it would be foolhardy to ask lawyers to consider stripping it from their language.

But using “with all due respect” could be very annoying or insulting when the phrase is appropriated by non-lawyers addressing fellow laymen, as in this complaint by a frustrated advocate: “Why is the government not paying attention? With all due respect [italicization mine], surely an economist like yourself can see the potential of such an innovation that could turn the Philippines into a superpower overnight.” Or in this remark by a feminist: “With all due respect [italicization mine], I do not know the level of pain that fathers go through after having his wife and the courts take his children away.” Here, “with all due respect” appears not to serve any useful purpose; in fact, omitting it makes the statement better-sounding and more forceful.

As to the phrase “to be (completely) honest (with you),” prefacing statements with it is often harmless in intimate or private conversations, but it can be very annoying when done publicly by politicians, public officials, and TV or radio talk-show hosts and guests. Consider the following remark by a public official in a TV interview in early 2005: “It’s [the bill’s] a little convoluted. To be honest with you [italicization mine], I could not sufficiently explain it at this point. But what was approved in principle last night is that there will be no pass-on insofar as the household consumers are concerned.” Or this remark by an information-systems sales manager in a newspaper interview: “[The competitor] can do what they want. And we don’t worry about market share. To be honest with you [italicization mine], it doesn’t make any difference to a customer.”

Speakers who habitually use “to be honest with you” obviously don’t realize it, but prefacing a statement with this phrase doesn’t enhance but actually detracts from the credibility of the statement. This is because although unintended, the phrase leads to the sneaking suspicion that the speaker is honest only in that particular instance and is generally dishonest at other times. And qualifying that phrase with “completely” only makes that impression stronger. In contrast, pruning out “to be honest with you” from such statements, or perhaps replacing it with the more concise “frankly,” can make the statements much more pleasant and convincing. 

The Plain English Campaign survey pinpointed 32 other very irritating English phrases, among them “24/7” (for “non-stop”) and such business and academic buzzwords as “address the issue,” “ballpark figure,” and “thinking outside the box,” but we need not discuss them in detail here. They are not that endemic in the Philippines anyway, and taking them up might only encourage the cliché fanciers in our midst to mindlessly spread their use through the broadcast media.³ (October 31, 2005)

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From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 31, 2005 issue © 2005 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

¹The most irritating phrase as determined by the Plain English Campaign survey in 1994 was, of course, “at the end of the day,” with “at this moment in time” as first runner-up. For the details, click this link to my essay “Doing battle with the most irritating phrases in English” that I posted earlier in the Forum. 

²Here, as reported by Google, is an update of the usage incidence of these clichés as of October 28, 2010 vs. the October 2005 figures: “with all due respect,” 3,890,000 hits vs. 1,720,000; “to be honest with you,” 2,210,000 vs. 592,000; and “to be completely honest with you,” 42,000 vs. 902,000. This is a worrisome growth in the usage of these irritating clichés.

³I’ll admit that I was too optimistic at the time that “24/7,” “address the issue,” “ballpark figure,” and “thinking outside the box” won’t attain annoying cliché status in the Philippines. However, we all know how indiscriminately these expressions have since been bandied about in academe, the corporate world, the mass media, and, of course, the web. We really need to firm up our individual resolve not to abet the use of these irritating clichés.

Giving the old college try to the fight against “boast of” and “nestled in”

It’s one thing to be proud of one’s country and one’s posessions, but it’s another to be always boasting about them—it can mark one as an inveterate braggart and get in the nerves of the listener to a point of no longer wanting to listen. This is the problem when one’s vocabulary for declaring possession of gets fixated in the “boast of” cliché, as in “The Philippines boasts of its rich healing practices that are deeply rooted in the people’s long tradition of wellness.” Ugh! That phrase puts an unpleasant color and leaves a bad taste on even the most well-meaning statements.

Another awful cliché in the Philippine hard-sell vocabulary is “nestled [in],” in the sense of “settled snugly or comfortably.” Its use for describing just about anything found on earth has become so indiscriminate that “nestled [in]” no longer evokes quiet comfort but outright vexation. Why don’t journalists and advertising copywriters just settle for unpretentious and much more honest words like “lies,” “located” or “situated”?

One-and-a-half years ago, when I thought that the mass media’s overuse of both “boast of” and “nestled in” had terribly gone out of hand, I decided to write an essay against their usage in my English-usage column in The Manila Times. From the looks of it, I don’t think their overuse has abated enough, so I am posting that same essay here to give my campaign against those two cliches the old college try.

Let’s wish ourselves all the luck!

Too much boasting and nestling in

If I were to judge from my newspaper, magazine, and web readings in recent years, it would appear that we are not only a most boastful people but also one so predisposed to petty exaggeration in our language. This is strongly evident in our glib overuse of two English expressions, “boast of [something]” and “nestled [in],” particularly in newspaper and magazine journalism, in advertising, and in the tourist literature.

Let’s talk about “boast of [something]” first. Its dictionary definition is, of course, “to puff oneself up in speech,” “to speak of or assert with excessive pride,” or “to possess and call attention to a source of pride.” Of course, it can also simply mean “to have” or “to contain”—the unboastful denotation that’s actually what is meant in many “boast of” statements.

Now, from Google’s estimated 775,000 citations* of what are “boasted about” in the Philippines, the following representative high-level boasts are perhaps semantically justifiable and factually defensible: “the Philippines boasts of some of the best beaches and scuba diving waters in the world,” “the Philippines boasts of a 94 percent literacy rate,” “the Philippines boasts [of] good English-language skills,” and “the Philippines boasts [of] some of the finest IT workers in the world.” Even so, if I were the drumbeater for these things, I’d be more circumspect and use “has” or “lays claim to” instead of “boasts of.” After all, levelheaded language often works much better than rank exaggeration in promotional talk of this kind.

Indeed, many of our boastings captured by Google are woefully out of proportion to the semantic enthusiasm expended on them: “Mindanao boasts of two new vapor heat treatment plants,” “[The library] boasts of a wealthy collection of multi-media materials on governance, productivity, and management,” “[The city] boasts of the first community-based breast screening program in RP,” “Domestic air travel market in Philippines boasts of a growth rate of 47 per cent,” and “One of the oldest in the province, this church boasts of a huge mural painting on its ceiling…” I think “boasts of” is out of line in all of these statements; the verb “has” could have done a much better job.

Now let’s talk about the terribly overused expression “nestled [in],” which means “settled snugly or comfortably” or “lying in a sheltered manner.” Google lists 288,000 citations for this expression in the Philippines alone, and when I looked at a representative sampling, I got the dreadful feeling that the expression is not only overused but subjected to severe semantic abuse as well.

Of course, there’s no doubt that the use of “nestled [in]” is semantically justified in these statements: “Nestled deep in the Cordilleras is Banaue, about nine hours from Baguio by bus,” “The first and only pine estate south of Metro Manila, [it] is a quiet sanctuary nestled in the gently rolling hills of Tagaytay,” and “Nestled atop a beachside cliff, [the resort] offers breathtaking views of the ocean from the balcony of your own private villa.” The sense of curling up comfortably and of restfulness is evident in all of these three statements.

But I think the writers had gone overboard in using “nestled [in]” in these highly contrived statements: “The Philippines lies nestled in the bosom of the East Asian growth area,” “Nestled in the center of everything worth the while, [the hotel] is located along Manila’s Roxas Boulevard fronting the Manila Bay,” “…the sophistication and elegance of a hotel [that’s] nestled right at the heart of Cebu’s bustling business district,” and “Taal Volcano—the word’s smallest volcano [that] is nestled in the middle of a scenic lake.”

Obviously, we can’t force everything to nestle into just anything for the sake of lending drama to our language. Instead of settling for a semantic near-miss, therefore, why not use a no-nonsense word like “lies,” “located” or “situated” instead? It will be right on the mark all the time. (August 23, 2008)

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*For some unknown reason, Google’s 775,000 citations for “boast of” in the Philippines on August 20, 2008 have dropped to 54,000 as of January 28, 2010.

** For some unknown reason, Google’s 288,000 citations for “nestled in” in the Philippines on August 20, 2008 have dropped to 70,400 as of January 28, 2010.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, August 23, 2008, © 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Two dreadful clichés now endemic in the Philippines

After writing several times against their use over the past seven years, I decided to leave two of the most dreadful clichés in the English language well enough alone. I thought that soon enough, people would realize that “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time” would lend neither grace nor added respectability to their utterances on TV and radio and in various other public forums. On the contrary, as a spokesman of the London-based Plain English Campaign has said, using those two clichés “is about as pro­fessional as wearing a novelty tie or having a wacky ring-tone on your phone. When readers or listeners come across these tired ex­pressions, they start tuning out and completely miss the message—assuming there is one.”

But as the 2010 national election season is now well underway in the Philippines, “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time” are—to use another dreadful cliché—once again rearing their ugly heads in the airwaves and public address systems. Indeed, during the debates of presumptive presidential candidates last November, at least three or four of them simply couldn’t resist spicing their locutions with “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time” with disgusting relish. If they are doing so on network TV without blushing, I told myself, all the more they would be doing it in English-language speaking engagements that aren’t covered live or don’t require TV or radio coverage—and all the more they would impress on their local listeners that it’s perfectly respectable to spout those dreadful clichés. Indeed, if these people aspiring for the highest post in the gift of the land use “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time” so liberally and so proudly as if they were precious linguistic gems, why don't we ordinary mortals?

And so I am compelled to post in this blog an essay I wrote for my column in The Manila Times in December of 2007, “The Reign of the Dreadful Cliches,” where I pointed out that “at the end of the day” and “at this moment in time” (a variation of “at this point in time”) are actually severely damaged semantic goods, condemned as the first and second most hated English clichés world­wide. I am hoping that if we can’t stop the presidential candidates and other aspirants for public office from using those two dreaded clichés, at least we could set the example by banning our tongues from articulating them and by suggesting to our friends and acquaintances to do the same.

The Reign of the Dreadful Clichés

Precisely what’s so special about “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time” that probably one out of four Philippine legislators and public officials and probably the same ratio of TV talk-show hosts, news anchors, and guests are mouthing them much too often and with so much relish these days?

Nothing really. “At the end of the day” is simply a longer, flamboyant way of saying “ultimately,” “in the end,” or “after all,” while “at this point in time” is similarly a longer, flamboyant way of saying “now” and “currently.” And these two adverbial phrases—old-time gram­marians call them “ablative abso­lutes”—aren’t really meant to call attention to themselves. Like such modifiers as “clearly” and “defi­nitely,” they are designed simply to call attention to a point being made by the speaker, so they need to be used very sparingly to avoid irritating the listener or reader.

What’s very disturbing, however, is that many people think that liberally spicing their talk with these expressions is a sign of wis­dom, discernment, and sophisti­cation. Little do they know that on the contrary, “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time” have for several years now been condemned as the two most irritating clichés in the English language.

In a survey conducted in 70 countries in 2004 by the London-based Plain English Campaign, in particular, “at the end of the day” ranked first and “at this moment in time” (a variation of “at this point in time”) ranked second among the most hated English clichés world­wide. As the group’s spokesman so aptly observed when the rankings of the most irritating clichés were announced, “Using these terms in daily business is about as pro­fessional as wearing a novelty tie or having a wacky ring-tone on your phone. When readers or listeners come across these tired ex­pressions, they start tuning out and completely miss the message—assuming there is one.”

Again, in 2005, in a poll of 150 senior executives all throughout corporate America by the tem­porary staffing company Accountemps, “at the end of the day” ranked first among the 15 most annoying clichés.

Finally, in 2006, in a poll of 10,000 news sources that included 1,600 American newspapers, the Australian-based database com-pany Factiva found “at the end of the day” at the top of the 55 most overused English clichés. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, to use a cliché, for that poll did not cover the US broadcast media where the overuse of “at the end of the day” is decidedly much more pro­nounced.

If “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time” have indeed become such dreadful banes to the English language, why is it that they are now enjoying such wide currency in the Philippines? They have become such pernicious semantic crutches for so many public officials, media people, and students, and their dependency level is such that they may no longer be able to speak their minds without overusing those two clichés.

I suspect that not so far back, a highly influential public figure either in government, media, or academe must have triggered this domestic overuse of “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time.” Perhaps he or she must have used these two clichés much too often during a major event that was covered live by all of the local TV networks, thus setting such a wrongheaded example for English-savvy speech for audiences all over the land.

It no longer matters who that culprit was, but there’s no doubt that we are now in the midst of an “at the end of the day” and “at this point in time” pan­demic, and the only way to stop it is for all of us to totally retire these damaged semantic goods from our writing and speech—right now. (December 22, 2007)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, December 22, 2007, © 2007 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.