Avoid Using These Phrases at Your Next Holiday Party
I’m often asked for tips on creating—and maintaining—executive presence. And while holiday office parties offer great opportunities for networking and image boosting, a verbal blunder can be an image-breaker.
Researchers at Oxford University agree on the importance of language. With their Oxford University Corpus database of the most commonly used phrases in books, papers, magazines, broadcast, the Internet, and other sources, they monitor the most obnoxious. Jeremy Butterfield used this Oxford research to write Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, which includes a list of the top ten most irritating phrases.
Here’s a checklist of common offenders. Consider removing these phrases from your holiday party conversations.
The Top Ten Most Irritating Phrases:
- At the end of the day
- Fairly unique
- I personally
- At this moment in time
- With all due respect
- Absolutely
- It’s a nightmare
- Shouldn’t of
- 24/7
- It’s not rocket science
Number eight also made my list of top ten grammar gaffes from my latest book, Booher’s Rules of Business Grammar: 101 Fast and Easy Ways to Correct the Most Common Errors.
(Read the full list here.)
Whether you’re making grammatical errors or simply annoying others with clichés and redundancies, such clutter can cost you a contract, cut you from the global competition, or mar an otherwise stellar impression.
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[...] year researchers at Oxford University published a list of the most irritating words and phrases. (Read my blog post and the Oxford list here.) Executives have now come up with their own list of overused clichés in the [...]