The War on Words — part 3

Irrelevance

Side note: This was originally going to be the last part in the series. Because of an email I received about a week ago, I've been inspired to create a fourth part in the series. At the rate of language degeneration, who knows how many parts there might be?

I hate phrases that are 'content-free': they don't mean anything. Much like I covered in part 2, these are catch-all phrases. But here, they appear to have meaning. This also incorporates part of Part 1 where the term means the opposite of what it appears to.

Some examples?

• "Significant Difference": apparently, just 'making a difference' is no longer enough
• "We are taking X very seriously": when you hear this it's from a talking head and it means they're doing nothing at all about X
• "Democratic": this poor adjective was worn out by the Soviet Union in the 1980's -- appearing in the name of the puppet German regime set up after WW2 called the 'German Democratic Republic' -- and the official name of the state of North Korea: 'Democratic People's Republic of...'. In any case, it just often now means that the people with the big guns are telling everyone else what to do, instead of people deciding for themselves what to do.
• "Responsibility": has no meaning any more.