And now, 10 phrases I’d like to banish for good this year

HERE, for fellow pedants everywhere, is my list of words and phrases that were rife in 2022 and which it would be wonderful to hear less of in 2023.

1 ‘INCREDIBLY’. I wrote here in 2019 about this word’s ubiquity, but no one has done anything about it. Government spokesmen seem most affected by this verbal tic. Last week, a story in the Times quoted one who declared both that the Prime Minister was ‘incredibly grateful for those people [in the military] during those strike days’ and that it was ‘incredibly disappointing’ that the RMT was continuing strikes. Whatever happened to ‘very’?

2 ‘I AM humbled’. Most often used by people when awarded public honours which they have long regarded as their due. ‘I am proud’ would be more honest.

3 ‘PLEASE reply to the invite by . . . ’ Invite is a verb. The noun is ‘invitation’.

4 ‘ PRE- PLANNED’. Worse: ‘ preprepared’. You can’t plan something after the event. Pre-prepared should be acceptable only from people with stutters. And certainly not in a document from the Crown Prosecution Service, which referred to defendants’ ‘pre-prepared statements’. 5

‘STORIED’. This is one of those words which no one uses in normal speech, but which broadcasters and some newspapers have been perpetrating. I have even seen ‘storied history’. It is an American term for ‘famous’. Neither word is of use.

6 ‘ANYTIME soon’. Another American import. Just ‘soon’ does the trick.

7 ‘SIMPLES’. This monstrosity comes from an advertising campaign starring a Russian meerkat. That campaign had been suspended, in the wake of the Russian war on Ukraine. The word itself should now become subject to sanction.

8 ‘UNBEKNOWNST’. Unknown is the word. ‘Unbeknownst’ tries to sound like something out of the works of Shakespeare or the original King James version of the Bible. But it appears in neither.

9 ‘METHINKS’. This archaism always precedes a statement of blinding obviousness and unoriginality, designed to make it sound more profound.

10 ‘END OF’. This year, let’s see an end to that, too.