Seven naughty words to be avoided
Way back in 1972 the American comedian George Carlin created a monologue entitled Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. No, we’re not going to say what those words were – suffice to say they are still bad enough to not grace the public airwaves.
But we were reminded of this when news broke last year that the Trump Administration had listed seven words banned from use in budget documents. The naughty words are vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, foetus, evidence-based, and science-based. That led us to begin thinking if there are any words or phrases that shouldn’t be used in motoring writing. So here, just for fun, are Seven Words We Try To Steer Away From ....
Co-efficient of Drag
If you want to cop some abuse from fellow motoring journalists during the launch of any new vehicle, just ask for the vehicle’s co-efficient of drag. The car company executives will respond with something like ‘‘0.29’’ but the fellow journos will respond with far more descriptive words such as ‘‘dork’’ or ‘‘poser’’.
That’s because the dumb question is probably either holding up the opportunity to drive the car, or go to dinner, depending on what time of the day it is. Cd is such a meaningless term, you see. It’s used to try to quantify the drag caused by an object in a fluid environment such as air or water. Apparently a cube has a Cd of 1.05, while a teardrop shape has a Cd of 0.04. So your average vehicle is somewhere in between. That means terms such as ‘‘slippery’’ or ‘‘bulky’’ are probably better descriptives.
And that probably doesn’t matter either because every vehicle’s new owner requires such things as window wipers, side
Rob Maetzig explains why certain words and phrases can ruin good motoring yarns.
mirrors and mud flaps, and installs such extras as roof racks and radio antennas, all of which ruin the Cd anyway. So in the motoring sense, let’s restrict ‘‘drag’’ to drag-racing.
Game-changer
This phrase is on the don’t-touch list because a motoring journalism colleague of ours once over-used it. Every new car he drove was a game-changer, or so it seemed. But no new vehicle is so good that it represents some pivotal moment in the history of the motor industry. It might have some flash new features but it won’t be a game-changer.
It’s always amusing how words and phrases get over-used in journalism. Right now every weather story seems to contain the phrase Big Dry, and you can guarantee that when winter comes and it rains a lot, we’ll start to be saturated with the phrase Big Wet. Or when it gets cold, Big Chill. So we’d much prefer that the term game-changer is reserved for sport. If someone scores a runaway try that changes the course of a game, then that’s a game-changer. Not when a vehicle’s got a new CVT transmission.
Moist
First question: Why would you want to use the word moist in a vehicle review anyway? Well, the answer might be to describe a wet windscreen because the air conditioning doesn’t work properly. Or to describe the weather outside, maybe?
It doesn’t matter because moist seems to be highly inappropriate. Do you know that surveys show it is one of world’s most hated words? Some time ago, a leading US magazine ran a poll that asked readers to nominate a word to scrub from the English language. There was overwhelming support to get rid of moist. Apparently it’s all because, unless you are discussing the moistness of a lovely piece of cake, if you add moist to an innocent sentence it makes it sound dirty. And we certainly don’t anything dirty to be associated with our vehicle reviews. Unless we’re talking about all the mud on a vehicle’s flanks, of course. Especially if said mud is still – ahem – moist.
Parallel park
Recently I was asked to write a piece asking why men always laugh when women try to parallel park. I refused on the grounds that no matter how I wrote the article, I would be accused of sexism. In other words, I was too scared to write it.
Equality of the sexes is at its best when it comes to parallel parking - women and men are equally useless at it. I know I am. I find it extremely difficult to do the reverse S-weave into a space between two parked cars. So I don’t do it. I simply carry on driving until I find a parking spot that I don’t need to shoehorn my vehicle into. Or, I road-test a vehicle that does all the parallel parking for me. They’re fantastic, and they’re great for the ego when onlookers don’t realise you’re not actually doing the parking. But at all other times we motoring journos are so embarrassed by our lack of parking prowess that we don’t like to mention the phrase.
Throb
Now, up until a short time ago I didn’t know this word caused issues. But when I researched and wrote an article that tried to explain why there can be a pronounced throbbing inside a car when being driven with one rear window open, fellow workers in my office complained that the word is .... yucky.
I asked why, and received the answer. Enough said – it’s been removed from my motoring journalism vocabulary. Unless we’re trying to describe the throbbing sound of a Subaru engine, of course. But even in that case maybe we should use the word thrub. Toe
I suspect that every motoring journalist ever made has used this phrase at least once: ‘‘This car has more toe than a Roman sandal.’’ I know I did – but then I saw the light and have never used it again.
Use of the word toe is OK if we’re discussing those things that poke out from the ends of our feet, or the angle of a car’s front wheels so they are either toe-in or toe-out, and it’s also OK if we’re talking about the gear-change technique called heel and toe. But even that is fast disappearing from from motoring journalism parlance because these days hardly anyone drives cars with manual transmissions.
User-friendly
This is a personal thing, because I once bet a fellow motoring writer that I could use the phrase userfriendly in every article I wrote for an entire year. I did, too but unsurprisingly I now really don’t like those two words, so I don’t use them.
My compatriot Linklater does, though. Just a few weeks ago he included a user-friendly in an article he wrote, and my response wasn’t very user-friendly at all because I almost fell off my chair in surprise. See? Here we go again!