Okay, call me an old fuddy duddy...but I do NOT think that this current cobbled word should be inserted in every single occasion.

I personally refuse to accept ginormous as an actual word.
It falls into the stinky trash can with the equally egregious " supposeably".

Or, is it just me?

In symple speche as I couthe,
That is lightest in mannes mouthe,
I mad noght for no disours,
Ne for no seggers, no harpours,
Bot for the luf of symple men
That strange Inglis can not ken.
- Robert Mannyng, A History of England

Ye knowe ek, in forme of speche is chaunge
Withinne a thousand yer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thenketh hem, and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do.
- Geoffrey Chaucer, Troylus and Criseyde

In 1962 it was Ogden Nash's turn:

Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;
We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,
A slovenliness provides its own excuse age,
Where usage overnight condones misusage,
Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage.

I just happened to be reading Language Change: Progress or Decay? by Jean Aitchison (part of 'Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics') when I saw the subject of your thread, Yvonne. I lifted Aitchison's examples 'cause I would never be able to think of any on my own -- not in a timely manner, at any rate!

When I hear it the meaning is : huge, impressive

Orangutanguage indeed.
IMHO it is cobbled 'street lingo'.

Siobhan, I'm with you on awesome being devalued to the point of being meaningless.

I'm not fond, either, of how gay has changed meaning -- especially the derisive, dismissive aspect. I have a female cousin whose first name is Gay, but she dropped it after putting up with sniggers from too many young ignoramuses.

Another overused word is popped when describing bright, eye-catching colors -- e.g., The fuchsia shade of her dress really popped. Someone told me that an advert on television for some sort of sunglasses with claims that their product will bring out the colors of nature -- really 'making colors pop' -- probably prompted it. I don't know since I've never seen the ad, but it's plausible that something like that would cause a lot of people from different places to use the same expression. That's one that I would like 'to just go away'.

i.e. "The cake was to die for. The house was to die for.
Her dress was to die for. " etc.

Ugh.

Someone needs to put it out of it's misery !

Well, Yvonne, if it's any comfort to you, not many go around exclaiming "Far out!" anymore, unless they're channeling John Denver who used it to excess when he was the host of "The Midnight Special" or maybe Cheech & Chong (one or both of them; I never could keep straight which was which). Rather recently I have heard several people under age thirty use 'groovy'. I'm not quite sure if they're being facetious or that dratted word is making a comeback.

To me it's jarring to hear young folk use words that I thought had long been relegated to the ash heap. However, I still use 'the bee's knees' and 'jeepers creepers' -- two phrases with heydays decades before I was born -- so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that the silliest sayings can be reborn.

What are some more of the antique phrases that have gone in and out of use several times? Vee, I had just about forgotten 'Fab'. Knowing me though, now that I've been reminded, I'm likely to use it unwittingly in the near future...and then I'll forget it again.

I had never heard or seen "ginormous" until about a month or two ago, and I consider myself very well-read. To me, it sounds like a new, made-up piece of slang.

My father used to constantly say, " I got the dope on such and such", meaning he had information on blank, etc. I always thought it sounded a bit bizarre, even in the 1940's and 50's.

For myself, when I am around younger people, I find it very difficult to avoid picking up some of their slang expressions.

It is difficult not to pick up speech quirks that you hear all around you. After all, that is how we learn our native language in the first place.

Rosefolly

....." Is that amazing, or what?! Is that easy, or what!
Is that delicious, or what!? Is that great looking, or what!?"

Hey, Ina.....Is that 'nails down a blackboard' , or what!?

*sigh*

As I say, just about EVERYONE says it. Where did it come from? How did it start? When will it go?

Although I might be guilty of mumbling it under my breath when my wife is going on about something or other. :)

Blah, blah, blah became yada yada yada and suddenly it's less rude and much more hip-sounding.

(or....is "hip" so passe' I just really dated myself !?!??!?)

I always thought that was rather clever !
Perhaps it was the budding seamstress in me....

way cool
smoking hot
he/she rocks
we are on the same page
totally
in sync
getting vibrations
the bottom line is
he/she plated the food (since when is plate a verb?)
it's Karma
it's a message from the Universe
it was meant to be
he went postal
it's synchronicity
down the rabbit hole
that dawg won't hunt

Overuse of words and phrases is a type of verbal tic. Some of these tics are so common in particular regions that they become intrinsically identifiable, and they can almost be viewed with affection. I'm thinking of the 'eh' that many Canadians stick on the end of almost every sentence, the 'man' (mon, mahn) of Jamaicans, the French 'nu?' etc. For a while (and maybe still are), 'like' and 'you know' were prevailing American tics of speech, especially among young Americans. However, I was never able to develop much affection for the American ones, but I've known non-Americans who can imitate the quirk quite amusingly.

Another phrase that comes to mind, "He/She went..as opposed to He/She said.. used to drive me up the wall.

Rosefolly

transition as a verb, as in "We expect to be transitioning to our new format soon."

fun as an adjective, as in "I had a fun time at the party."

It wouldn't help to find out that these go way back in time. They're being very, very much overused now. Enough!

And what about people telling something who can't resist throwing the word "like" in at intervals, as in "When he said that to me, I was like horrified"?

Or "totally"? Change the sentence above to: "When he said that to me, I was like totally horrified."

a) understand that the concert was good
b) understand that the concert was not good
c) someone was ill at the concert

If you selected a), then you'd be "hip" to today's lingo. If you selected b) or c), you would be correct in using the English language as it used to be in the mid-2000s.

Suffice it to say that when I first encountered the term, I was understandably confused. I had to listen for the context of the term (and sometimes the context wasn't there!) to comprehend what was being said.

One could also make the same plea for the term "bad" -- depending on the context or the tonal inflection as the word is said, the term "bad" can mean "good" or "not good". As an example, one could say "Dude, that mother was BAD!" (insert hand gestures including punctuating the term with hand gestures comprising pointing one or two index fingers to the ground in front of one's chest) Note that the term "bad" is pronounced "beh-yyd".

If such is the case, then the term "bad" has a positive meaning in that the person referred to (i.e. "that mother") has superlative or at least desirable characteristics. Note as well that the person referred to may be male OR female.

Now, if you use the term "bad" with a shake of the head or a downcast look, then the term is supposed to have the negative connotation.

Of course, there is also that use of the term "bad" when owning up to something that is one's fault or for which one is accepting blame. I refer to that ungrammatical phrase (and phrase it is!), "My bad". As an example, if you spill something on someone, you're expected to say "Ooops. Sorry! My bad."

I think I could explain where the positive connotation of "bad" originates as well as the origin of the term "mother" for any person who has qualities which one may wish to emulate but ... since I'm sure we have quite a few readers with delicate constitutions, I will forego said explanation.

(I should also mention that the term "epic" is also in use as a synonym for "sick" or "awesome".)

If you are now completely confused, befuddled, and, indeed, shocked at all of the above, think of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind....We are not alone.

(Yes, kids nowadays are aliens... brain-sucking aliens bent on world conquest.)

But I admit to being guilty of using "fun" the way Jwttrans describes. I have done so all my life starting in childhood, so I suspect I will continue.

Rosefolly

So I keep it and use it too !

She also used to say "last day" instead of yesterday.
It made sense to me.
Sort of like last night or last time.

People on our cooking shows don't plate food, they 'plate up'.

I have a tendency to pick up the speech habits of others, so living with a very 'hip' teenager, I have been known to say 'my bad'. So far I have avoided picking up 'mang' which he uses like 'mate', as in 'Hey mang, how's it going?'

But there are two things that really do annoy me. One is the use of 12am and 12pm instead of midnight and midday (if people knew what am and pm stood for, they might not use it). I have been told it is obvious that 12am is midday, but I don't think it obvious at all. After all, at 5 minutes after noon, it is 12:05pm.
The second, which I seem to hear all the time, is the proof is in the pudding instead of the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The first makes no sense at all.

Does that make sense??

That was my personal best time for that event.

I have walked (never run) a marathon on four different occasions. I know which one was my personal best, but I always did the best I could on that day, every time I crossed the start line. BTW, I haven't done this for several years, and have no plans to do it again.

Rosefolly

As I listen to professional broadcasters on the radio I find that there is a lot of "ta" or " tuh" instead of TO.
"He had tah report the issue....."

OR

"duh" instead of THE

And these are supposedly intelligent, educated speakers.

Where has eloquence gone !?

sorry, couldn't resist

The little filler words stick out in all languages even to a non-native speaker and the speaker seems often not to be aware of the meaning. I know very little Italian so I asked an Italian friend what "beh" meant, a word he used all the time, even when speaking English or Swedish. He didn't know but I looked it up and it's short for "bene", good, so it's used exactly like English "well". I know even less Arabic but I spent some time in the Sudan where people would begin every other sentence with "yani". Nobody could explain it and I had long forgotten the word but I was reminded now and googled it. It means "I mean" or "that is to say". The purpose seems mainly to be to give the speaker time to think what to say next, like "er".

I find it irritating when people, especially those in the media, substitute the word orientate for orient. The two words mean essentially the same thing, but the latter is shorter and more familiar.

My Oxford Concise Dictionary has a whole paragraph listing the many uses of the word orient, including to "settle or find the bearings of". Yet only a few weeks ago I heard a reporter state that newly-arrived athletes were "orientating" themselves in Olympic Village. The word orientate is in no way an improvement in meaning to orient. In fact the former sounds awkward and affected (to me).

In a backhanded way, the above reminds me of the slow death of the perfectly-acceptable noun quotation. You almost never hear someone under 45 use this word, unless they are referring to the title of a specific reference book.

The word quote is now commonly used as a catch-all, to be used both as a verb and a noun. It is now commonplace to hear/read people say/write sentences like: "This is my favorite Shakespeare quote."

I am old enough to remember when there were two specific words (quote, quotation) both of which had slightly different meanings and uses.

Okay, I have to got to lighten up about things most people don't care about.

Mudlady, I agree that often so is an annoying verbal tick which doesn't really mean anything, except to buy the speaker an extra second or so to gather their thoughts.