Hubby not hotty of the year
There are certain words and phrases in popular use which would be better banished to the banned list.
CHILDHOOD letter-writing classes always stressed the importance of inquiring about the recipient’s health. “Dear Bobby, how are you? I am fine,” was the general salutation in letters to friends. That is, until high school when pupils were instructed that such a clichéd introduction was not acceptable.
But of late it seems that ‘How are you?’ has crept back into popularity. The phrase is to be found frequently in e-mails, even those from strangers, even those which are quite formal. Hardly one arrives without the obligatory, “I trust that you are well?” or “I hope you are in good health.” Really? Do you?
Asking such a question puts self control under immense pressure, because my fingers itch to write back and say: “Actually no, my health is not good. I had a horrible bout of the flu, the fourth this month, and to top it all I must have eaten something bad at the curry den last night because… but I’m on the mend, thanks for asking.”
No? Why ask a question when you do not want an answer? It’s similar to those people who gush all over you and trill: “Dahling, we must do lunch,” or “You must come to the cottage for the weekend,” and other such invitations and you, sucker, not being mindful of certain social conventions, try to pin down the invitation. Suddenly the are frightfully busy: “It’s Great-aunt Gertrude’s 100th birthday,” or they have to check their diary.
People are such copycats. One PR sends an ‘I trust you are well’ e-mail and everyone else believes they must follow suite.
We do the same with words and expressions. One that was capable of setting my teeth on edge some years ago was ‘At this moment in time’. What was wrong with ‘now’, Heaven knows. Why use one word when you can use five? It was a happy day when that one slinked off into oblivion.
The latest is ‘going foward’. Every Tom, Dick and Jane is ‘going forward’. What happened to ‘in the future’, ‘soon’, ‘I have no idea what will happen’?
It is this corporate speak which has crept in to everyday use that sounds important but in reality means nothing, and most sentences and speeches would survive, and be better, without it.
The word that is really capable of making my toes curl is ‘Hubby’. It is on social media, dieting and school groups and on Facebook. It seems to be the flavour of the year because everyone is using it. In every facet of our lives we have ‘Hubby’, that poor, potbellied, henpecked individual who would not dare call his wife ‘wifey’.
‘Hubby’ is the diminutive, an overgrown baby. It is the most unsexy thing to call your man. ‘Hubby’ conjures up an image of someone who would not be in the running for hottie of the year, a little like your pet rather than your partner. It’s almost as bad as when men refer to the women in their lives as ‘the wife’, as in ‘the dog’, ‘the car’, ‘the house’.
Something that has puzzled me for some time is the pronunciation of ‘been’, particularly by the youth and television news readers. When did ‘been’ become ‘bin’?
Talking of the young, those of tender years among my colleagues tell me that the latest word on the street, which really, really irritates them, is from guys who call them ‘Bae’, an abbreviation of ‘Babe’.
Perhaps they think it’s less sexist, but really, when one needs to shorten a four letter word to be cool, one has image problems.
