It’s difficult to find anything to add to Gene Weingarten’s “Goodbye, cruel words: English. It’s dead to me,” published in the Washington Post.
He targets the ghastly misuse of language—not by the public, but by journalists. I was particularly delighted that he spent an entire paragraph bemoaning the increasing use of the sanctimonious phrase “to reach out to” (in place of “to call” or “to get hold of”); it’s a phrase that evokes my gag reflex every time I hear it.