Anyone can be a bad travel writer. It’s as easy as using clichés, not quoting locals, and writing about your husband Larry as much as possible. David Farley, who’s clearly read a few too many bad travel articles, gives a few tips on World Hum about how to create the worst, most unenlightening, hackneyed travel writing ever. Here’s one of his tips:

Tell, don’t show. Sure, you could write something like, “We traipsed across the chunky cobblestones of the village’s only lane, flanked by half-timbered, thatched-roof houses, and we could smell the morning’s first offerings from the village bakery.” But why, when you could just as easily write, “The village was quaint and charming”?

Source: World Hum

The National Conference of Editorial Writers recently released a list of their most-hated journalistic clichés, the mushy euphemisms and trendy phrases that they think ought to be banned. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch excerpted the survey, along with some of the editorialists’ biting commentary:

• Issues and challenges: “No one has problems any more. We have ‘issues.’ Likewise, we have ‘challenges.’…Why isn’t that a ‘problem’?”
• Faith-based: “Almost 100 percent of the time this phrase is used, the user means ‘religious,’ and they should just suck it up and use the real term.”
• Declined comment: “We’re not inviting people to tea parties here. We’re asking questions....They didn’t ‘decline comment.’ They ‘would not comment.’”
• Closure: “An appalling word that crept out from the woodwork of psychobabble where it squats, poisoning the language, above all in journalism.”

 (Thanks, Get Religion.)

Americans delight in bashing French movie clichés—the cigarettes! the adultery! the self-conscious seriousness! French films are perhaps an easy target for mockery. Still, I can’t help but laugh at this particularly creative send-up, a bit of one Netflix user’s review of François Ozon’s See the Sea, singled out by the blog A Whine Colored Sea:

Key elements to a french movie - slow as thick snot in January - moral depravity - infidelity - boobs are shown, sometimes crotch - people smoking…

These do not make for essential viewing:

Only recommended if you enjoy activities like sewing your head to the carpet…

Image by Nils Alsleben, licensed under Creative Commons.

Clichés are often the refuge of people who don’t know what they’re talking about. This is patently clear when people cherry-pick words from psychology. PsyBlog has compiled 30 of the most hated psychobabble phrases, including the following:

1. “He’s totally projecting.”
2. “I’m stuck in denial.”
3. Calling someone “bipolar”
4. And my favorite, “I get really OCD about cleaning my kitchen”

The problem with most of these phrases is how often they’re misused. Being moody isn’t the same as being bipolar. And keeping a clean kitchen doesn’t mean a person has obsessive compulsive disorder.

(Thanks, MindHacks.)