In an interview celebrating the New York Review of Books‘s fiftieth anniversary, the publication’s longtime editor, Robert Silvers, divulges the muddled phrases that drive him crazy:
Framework could rightly refer to the supporting structure of a house, or a wooden construction for holding roses or hollyhocks in a garden, but now the word is used to refer to any system of thought, or any arrangement of ideas. And it really means nothing.
The most heretical thing we do is try to avoid context. Context has an original, useful meaning, now generally lost: the actual language surrounding a particular text—con, meaning “with,” and text—and now it’s used for every set of surrounding circumstances or state of things, and it gets worse with contextualize, sometimes used to mean some sort of justification.
Even more insidious and common is in terms of, a fine phrase if you are talking about mathematical equations or economic functions in which specific “terms” are defined, but it is just loose and woolly when you say things like “in terms of culture,” for which there are simply no clear terms.
Then there is the constant movement of every kind of issue—war, treaty, or political feud—on or off “the table.” The question of an independent Palestinian state is on the table! Or is it off the table? It’s become a way of avoiding a more precise account of just what’s happening.
The Dish 