It really does.” it makes the speaker sound repetitive AT BEST, and unreliable at worst. When a declarative sentence like, “That makes sense”, is followed with the meaningless, “…it does. The dog wants what? Out? What does that mean? Either stop being lazy and just say, “The dog wants to go outdoors” or hand it a copy of Out Magazine. If you met someone who said, “In 18 years you’ll drive a yellow sedan that was manufactured in New Mexico.” You would excuse yourself from the conversation.

This assumes that it is a normal conversational convention for people to casually predict the future.

“If someone would have told me a decade ago that in 10 years I’d be doing X, I would NEVER have believed it.” Substitute with: I don’t care, or just silence.Ĥ. You don’t give a rat’s ass about what? Linguistic originality? Did you think this whole conversation was a big lead up to my asking, “Do you have any rodent sphincters I can have?” Such banality actually hurts your case, not enhances it. If a steak is truly great, an event truly random or funny, it would inspire you to actually devote an original thought to it. If you just truncate, and rearrange the original sentence you are left with stylistically fine, if uninspired, sentence. Save us the stupidity and turn your interrogative sentence into a declarative one: That WAS funny. The formula of: “How X was Y?,” How good was that steak?,” “How random was that?” Substitute with: Not making the definition be the exact words of the words being defined.Ģ. When was that in dispute? Did someone say, “Hey, it is not what it is.”, or, “It is what it is not.”? Here is what you just said: It is = It is. (Author’s Note: You may also enjoy installments II and III of the Overused Phrased Dumb People Say trilogy) But they all share (at least) one common thread: I hate them all. Some of these everyday phrases make the speaker sound unintelligent because they lack originality, some indicate poor grammar, and others just connote mental laziness.

Wow they're doing it wrong