Stop saying "issues"!

"I have an issue with "issue"– with the word, that is. It pops up everywhere, meaning everything and meaning nothing. One hears of a pitcher who has rotator-cuff issues, of a landlord who has issues with pets in his buildings, of a bill up before Congress that poses jurisdictional issues. A weather reporter informs me that dressing warmly in a snowstorm is the main issue. The issue over reinstating the draft is whether soldiers serving only two years can be of serious military use."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-issue-issue/article/928456

You have issues.

2 -- Personal attack, bub.

All you have to do is add an initial "t" and it moves from cliché to surreal...

My experience at one workplace was that there were many "issues" and they all had to be "addressed".

>5 PossMan: ...many "issues" and they all had to be "addressed".

Envelopes, on the other hand, used to be addressed, but now there's only one of them, and it has to be pushed. Very odd.

Funnily, I stumbled yesterday on this piece of information:

Company director Bex Baxter, who employs 31 staff – seven male – at the social community group Coexist, wants to change the stigma around ‘women’s issues’. Bex, 40, said: ‘I have managed many female members of staff over the years and I have seen women at work who are bent over double because of the pain caused by their periods. ‘Despite this, they feel they cannot go home because they do not class themselves as unwell. ‘And this is unfair. At Coexist we are very understanding. If someone is in pain – no matter what kind – they are encouraged to go home.

So I remembered this thread, and thorold's remark in #4: obviously in that case a "t" is missing, isn't it?

>7 Pepys: the stigma around ‘women’s issues’

Ouch! That's just clumsy in so many different ways, all embarrassing. A phrase that could only be used by someone with no imagination and no sense of the history and meaning of words.

The use of "around" as an all-purpose preposition is revolting. While prepositions are usually a challenge for a second-language learner, there's no excuse for a native speaker of reasonable intelligence to come out with expressions such as "stigma around." (I think what the good director is trying to say is that there's a stigma concerning menstruation.) The noise level in the basketball arena is too high? Then we have a problem with the noise level, not a problem around it. The vestry's having a discussion about what they're looking for in the new rector, not around what they're looking for. This barbarity seems to have become very popular just in the last ten years or so. Where did it come from? I suspect it's a favorite of postmodernists, who are notorious for their poor communication skills. They are also the ones who delight in inserting excess virgules, hyphens, and parentheses into the titles of their papers and books. (Better not do it in my class!)

Yes, let's cut back on the "issues."

Then we can turn our attention to an all-out campaign against "iconic."

>9 orsolina: I suspect it's a favorite of postmodernists, who are notorious for their poor communication skills.

Derrida is dead. Foucault died before many of your students were alive. I would be stunned if any major linguistic shift happened because of postmodernism, and find the idea that a change in the last ten years or so can be attributed to them risible.