Sexy data

I was chatting to a colleague about my blog, indulging in a bit of shameless marketing for my witterings during the lunch hour.  I mentioned that I had intended yesterday's blog to be about the use of the word 'sexy' as a meaningless filler word, but that a quick internet search had ended in a vast list of potential porn sites because I hadn’t sufficiently thought through the search terms.

My colleague suggested that I should blog about overuse of the word 'basically'.  She is a former teacher and said any conversation with a teenager involved endless repetition, removing all traces of 'basically' so teachers could understand what the student was trying to say.  This then led us on to a middle-aged discussion of other irritating words and phrases, with basically, sexy, literally, like and 'do you know what I mean' topping the list.

Constant use of these meaningless filler words is not limited to teenagers.  Everybody does it, and I include myself in that.  I have noticed in my blogging how often I use 'however' and am trying to cut down to no more than two per blog post.  A quick search of the internet revealed many blogs on the subject. In 2002, John Mullan writing for The Guardian, noted that 'basically' was 'a key component of so-called "Estuary English".  Gwen Stephens, in her 'The 4 a.m. Writer' blog, rightly terms it a 'sickening excess'.  Her post notes that Michigan's Lake Superior State University publishes an annual list of banished words.  (I wanted to write 'actually publishes a list', but that is another overused filler word.) 'Basically' has appeared several times, 'like' appears once.  It being a US list, although nominations for words are accepted from anywhere, I wasn't surprised that 'know what I mean' didn’t make an appearance, but had expected to see 'literally' in there, but it is yet to sufficiently irritate contributors. 

Sexy didn't make the list either, but now that I have recovered from the attack of the killer porn sites, I have managed to discretely research its overuse.  Even the Harvard Business Review refers to statisticians as the 'sexiest job' of the 21st century.  I am appalled, and not just because my grasp of statistics is insufficient to endow me with a claim on this trade.  It cannot be long before 'sexy' is makes LSSU's list.  I recently witnessed a conversation between two businessmen.  The words to convey just how dull they were have yet to be invented and their topic of conversation was, from what I could gather between the filler words, referring mainly to datasets.  One of them said the word 'sexy' no less than twelve times, without any sense of irony, with his colleague nodding eagerly in agreement.  Datasets and sexy are not two words I would expect to see near each other outside of a Scrabble board. 

I should have interrupted and asked them how data could be termed "sexy".  Since then, I have tried studying spreadsheets of statistics intently.  I didn't feel so much as a mild twinge of flirtation, let alone fully fledged sexual attraction.  I tried increasing the number of digits after the decimal point, lest greater detail should light my fire, but still nothing happened.  Is it me?  Am I numerically frigid?  Or is it that our everyday conversation is now so rife with filler words that people felt a word such as 'sexy' has had to be introduced in a lame attempt to grab listeners' jaded attention.