funny you should mention it

emila_wan has a post about being driven batty by overuse of fixed phrases.  In her case, she's made nuts by the "waves" metaphor, which is probably particularly frustrating since she reads mostly (if not exclusively) TPM, where emotions and feelings and whatnot are always radiating from people in waves rather than, I don't know, pulses or gusts or whatever.  Personally, the whole radiating thing bugs me over there, irrespective of the shape of what's radiating, and the shields and the dials and so on ... the whole Force concept is verrry tricky to do in ways that don't make people roll their eyes.

But anyway, the reason I bring it up ("it" being the fact that emila_wan brought it up in the first place [g]) is that I've been reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, and liking it fine, but in the past few days I've been driven BANANAS by the writer's (over-)use of term as a transitive verb.  "Blah blah blah some phenomenon, which anthropologists term jargon item."  "Yadda yadda found in somplace or other (termed buzzword)."  I don't think one such use would bother me, but it's EVERYWHERE and now ANY TIME I SEE IT it's making me CRAZY.  Didn't he have a grad student (HA!  I just mis-typed that "grad stupid") whose job it was to look over the manuscript and flag the fact that he'd used the same unusual construction FIVE TIMES IN A TWO-HUNDRED-WORD PARAGRAPH?

And if not, why on earth am I the only one qualified to notice such things?