‘Community leader’, ‘call out’, ‘dreamer: The worst words and phrases in the English language

In this week’s magazine Rod Liddle has a piece on the worst ‘clichés, lies, evasions, obfuscations, PC euphemisms and disingenuous balls words and phrases which, in recent years, have annoyed me the most’. He was inspired by Brook Newmark’s recent shenanigans with a phantom lady and a computer, which were explained as the MP ‘battling his demons’.

Rod also includes vulnerable, community, ‘bravely fighting cancer’, vibrant, diversity and, of course, ‘wrong side of history’.

For a while I’ve been collecting my own worst words and phrases in the ever-evolving English language, a sort of dictionary of political cant that I work on to keep me sane. I suppose you’d call it politically correct English, although I find the phrase tedious and it makes people think about things like ‘baa baa white sheep’ rather than the stuff that matters. In orders words, they think PC is about politeness when mostly it is about control, in this case controlling the language, altering the meaning of words so that it becomes harder to articulate particular viewpoints.