The "hated words" thread

[Lise]

And a word I'm learning to hate:
Penultimate
its like it was just discovered and now everybody has to use it to sound upscale. all it means is next to last.
sheeeeeeeez

Penultimate has become popular?

At last! I'm one of the cool kids! A teacher made fun of me in 7th grade for using "redundant" (correctly, by the way). "Ooh, don't we use big words?!" I should've replied, "ooh, don't you have a little vocabulary?!" But I digress.

I've read the entire thread, and am comforted to find that many fine women are offended by the misuse of "impacted". Phew. This is a great relief to me. I feared that I was alone in the world.

This "hated" word is unique to certain areas, where folks have grown up speaking Spanish at home, but English everywhere else: Drank. As in: (in English), "I drank my pills", because the word "tomar" in Spanish means both "to take" and "to drink". I grit my teeth every time I hear it, but have abandoned all hope of correcting it. Argh, that makes me imagine how much my patients must endure my misuse of words in Spanish...