Untimely cliches banned!

It seems that even the great and good who write for the Times Literary Supplement need to be brought to heel on occasion – their engine room has issued a list of words and phrases that are not to be used in that august organ:

  • iconic
  • ironically
  • carbon footprint
  • time poor
  • black/Muslim/literary community
and
  • any reference to sex beginning in 1963, in conjunction with Philip Larkin

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Most of these are over-used and could probably do with being filtered out. "Carbon footprint" seems an odd one to ban though, being a useful phrase in common usage to describe a reasonably complex concept. Surely any article that did need to touch on this concept would simply be rendered unwieldy by having to constantly explain something for which a convenient shortcut already exists?

JD (The Engine Room) said...

I don't know for certain, but I imagine they have replaced it with something just as pithy but a little less buzzwordy, such as 'carbon cost'.