Here’s a critique of Katie Couric’s word choices during her first week hosting the CBS Evening News. Targets: exclusive, unprecedented, needless to say, and telling you how the story is going to make you feel. None of these are limited to Katie Couric or the CBS Evening News, though.
My own TV news bugaboos are tragic, stunning, shocking and you won’t believe.
Really, it’s all so tragically stunning.
Here’s one more to add to your list of TV bugaboo verbiage/overused phrases/if I hear it one more time, I’m gonna hurl:
“With that being said,…”
American spokennews definitely has its own style of English, from a tiny, over used, library of some twenty stock-phrases to the bizarre cadence not even used by the best orators. All i can guess is that this culture is some ancestor of the now dead town_crier, whose words (“Oyez!”) and rythem of speech were designed to attract and maintain the nearby masses’ attention.
While we might tirer of the too often used phrases and the their odd styles of speeche, i tend to see it as linguistic-spexialization, the hallmark of a strong and enduring idea-centric society. That’s not such a bad trait.
rob@egoz.org
Is it just me or does anyone else have a hard time understanding Rob Adam’s posts? Strange. Strange indeed.