As a reader, I read every word, unless I am in a hurry and am reading not for pleasure but for information, the kind that allows me to unlock one door so I can move through the next one. As a listener, I do something similar, which is why I have a hard time listening to radio interviews.
Thankfully that sentence-ending, emergency brake of language -- "going forward" (aka "moving forward") -- is less frequent now than it was two years ago. I wish I could say the same of hockey players who, because they think the media is stupid for having never played the game (Is the literary critic stupid for having never written a novel? Is the hockey player stupid for having never graduated from high school?), begin or end every second response with obviously.
More recent irritations include a word I no longer hear without seeing the gloating, puckering face of Donald J. Trump, and that word is tremendous. I know it's not fair to think that everyone who uses tremendous is a Trump supporter, only that language has a way of taking root in our noodle and spilling out once our mouth starts moving. An even bigger irritation is the word absolutely, especially when it's the first word out of the interviewee's mouth after the interviewer asks if they could talk about their appreciation of Nietzsche and why we should still be reading him.
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