I already have a list I give out to my composition students of overused words and phrases--things like, "In the history of...", "Webster's dictionary defines ____ as...", "Only time will tell," or, weirdly enough, the word "truly."
However, at Matt Dischinger's suggestion, I'm going to start a list of words here which appear frequently in critical writing but rarely anywhere else. These are not specifically theory words, like "deconstruct" or "almost already," but regular words which get overused in criticism.
Matt's example was "bulwark." What else is there?
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ReplyDeleteI now see "bulwark" EVERYWHERE! Mark has suggested it might make a nice replacement for "bullshit."
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