My least favorite phrase in the English language is ‘I don’t care.’
I had a slight hope the phrase ‘spark joy’ might become popular, as it was the keyword that I wanted to put forward in the first place.
I’ll admit, sometimes I’ve paid the bills with acting. You know the phrase, ‘It’s one for the money, two for the showreel.’ I don’t want that as a director. I don’t want to compromise myself. There’s a big old wide world out there. I want to explore it.
This is the way that I like to phrase it: we want to focus on 100% of the problem, and you can only focus on 100% of global emissions if you have technology that is exportable, clean, reliable, and cheap.
It is hard to know exactly when the Arab Spring, a phrase used to describe the beginning of the Arab peoples’ demand for democracy and human-rights reform, started.
It’s a sad commentary on our time – to use a phrase much favored by my late father – that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies.
I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.
The phrase ‘misuse of privilege’ is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It’s becoming a devalued term, and it’s making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions.
Silicon Valley isn’t the only game in town. Tech is increasingly decentralized. Around the world, new tech centers with younger companies are able to embrace a different approach to talent: recruit locally, identify homegrown prospects and, in a phrase, bring them along for the ride.
In this culture, the phrase ‘black woman’ is not synonymous with ‘tender,’ or ‘gentle.’ It’s as if those words couldn’t possibly speak to the reality of black females.
The best timed joke or the best timed phrase comes at spontaneous moments and just relies on me as the host to be very quick, and that’s what I do.
I’ve always liked older women. One sad thing about being my age is that there are no older women. I used to amuse my mother’s friends even at five or six with witty turns of phrase. Somehow, I just knew how to be funny.
One phrase I would dearly like to consign to the can is ‘Out of the Box.’ The thinking that told us we should invade Iraq and that house prices never decline may have been out of the box, but it put us into the ditch. We have been badly misled by people who persuaded us that they understood things we didn’t.
I’ve always been sensitive to the phrase ‘like a girl,’ especially when I was growing up and was told I couldn’t play with the boys. It really resonated with me. I was so inspired by the first #LikeAGirl video, and I wanted to be a part of such a powerful message.
In the language of politics, there is only one translation for the phrase ‘hope and change,’ to wit: ‘big, fat government.’
A Pike, in the California dialect, is a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the plains were from Pike County, Missouri; but as the phrase, ‘a Pike County man,’ was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it was soon abbreviated into ‘a Pike.’
Videogames based on golf have often been viewed as, to mangle a phrase, a good walk through a virtual world spoiled. Connecting with your virtual golfers has often been as hard for gamers as understanding the sport itself.
I actually feel like the phrase ‘big in Japan’ is not appropriate for me. The reason is that there are more people who sympathize with my practice in America than there are domestically in Japan.
I have heard my fill of hurtful words. I think it’s especially egregious when citizens like me, who point out abuses in their country, are referred to as ‘do-gooders.’ This is how a phrase that can be used to stop an argument dead becomes part of common usage.
To not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice, which I’ve done all my life, and not to be able to phrase lyrics and give people that kind of joy, I think I would be totally devastated.
As a Polish American, I grew up hearing the phrase ‘nothing about us without us.’ To Eastern Europeans, the vow is a painful reminder of how Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt carved up their small countries after World War II, placing them, against their will, under Soviet domination.
There definitely isn’t a structure anymore to how I get ideas. A lot of times I’ll just write down a phrase, or I’ll have an idea that’s attached to just a few chords. Other times, it’s work.
I have an idea that the phrase ‘weaker sex’ was coined by some woman to disarm the man she was preparing to overwhelm.
The most common phrase bandied about these days is ‘Oh my God’. People say it automatically all the time – not realising that that’s a form of prayer.
I don’t understand why it’s not okay to be plus-size. I don’t know why people hate that phrase. Many models have built their careers as plus-size women and then suddenly don’t want to be called that anymore. But you’re still cashing checks from plus-size designers.
I just make up lyrics off the top of my head. A lot of times, there’s a phrase I really like, and I kind of build the song around that.
I do believe that our modern English usage has become way too clipped and austere. I have been reading excerpts from the journals of 18th-century seafarers lately, and even the lowliest press-ganged deck-swabber turns a finer phrase than I do most days.
‘Everything is four’ is a phrase that has been coined before me. Four is a number of completion. Four is a number that’s literally all around.
Well first of all, I think the phrase ‘jump the shark’ has jumped the shark. I read it in every article and I think that when Fonzie actually jumped the shark, ‘Happy Days’ was on the air for another five years.
The American Dream is a phrase we’ll have to wrestle with all of our lives. It means a lot of things to different people. I think we’re redefining it now.
In a phrase: I always hope it keeps getting better.
I never thought I’d be using this phrase, but the pursuit of happiness – that’s my right.
I have employees that are, you know, other types of diversity, coming to me and saying ‘Well, why aren’t we focused on these other areas as well?’ and I said yes, we should focus them, but, you know, the phrase we use internally is, ‘If everything is important, then nothing is important.’
The First World became a popular phrase in about the 1970s and ’80s. The World Bank then began categorizing countries in different categories, advanced to the least developed.
When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.
The greatest moment of all was her on set, and she said, ‘Would you mind if you change the order of the phrase?’ Maggie Smith asking me if I could change the line, asking politely, using my name!
A great deal has been written in recent years about the purported lack of motivation in the children of the Negro ghettos. Little in my experience supports this, yet the phrase has been repeated endlessly, and the blame in almost all cases is placed somewhere outside the classroom.
So much of the time, in politics, we try to come up with these clever turns of phrase, slogans or messages, but what the public really wants is just the simple facts.
Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.
I’ve always been interested in image and reputation management. Because really, when you think about it, it is an old phrase, but all we have is our word and our good name.
I’m a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase ‘woman writer’ as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.
Congress seems to believe that ‘Children are our future’ is a phrase coined by tobacco advertisers.
Avoiding the phrase ‘I don’t have time…’, will soon help you to realize that you do have the time needed for just about anything you choose to accomplish in life.
