Looking at the examples, I don't see much of complaining.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
iRidescence
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Same here. Just because it doesn't exactly explain in detail why the "meaningful words" are meaningless, doesn't mean it's complaining
And even if the examples are negative, that's not really a problem because this is an inherently negative trope.
The problem though is when people interpret "meaningless meaningful words" as "bad dialog" and use it for irrelevant complaints.
Some misuse on the main page:
- Mystery Men: Those lines are formulaic, but they're not meaningless. Each one's meaning is very clear.
- South Park: The example actually says "Admittedly, there's arguably no pretense of meaningfulness here," yet the editor thought it worth listing.
- Real Life: Us, apparently, for using "egregiously" and "aforementioned" too often. (Overuse has nothing to do with meaningless)
I did a huge cleaning, including some of the items mentioned ^ - the others will be pulled through the Real Life Section Maintenance topic.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
I can spot quite a few more bad examples in just a glance.
Can you pinpoint which examples?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
One of the Real Life examples given is the use of 'full stop', in spit of TV Tropes being 'a website, not a telegram'. Although in North America the common name is 'period', in British English 'full stop' is actually the most-used term and so this is not so much Meaningless Meaningful Words as Separated by a Common Language.
In TV Tropes usage it's more of a meme than anything else. Still a bad example, but not because "well, Britain uses it all the time", more because it's not even trying to be meaningful (unless it's used because people think British usages are more "distinguished"). It's less Meaningless Meaningful Words or Separated by a Common Language than it is just plain Word Cruft.
edited 30th Dec '13 8:40:37 AM by MorganWick
Hi
Clock is set.
Hi
Clock's up; locking for inactivity.
All right, it seems that Meaningless Meaningful Words has a lot of complainings, and has decayed to "Complaining about Wording you Don't Like". Am I the only one who thinks a cleanup is in order?
Halper's Law: as the length of an online discussion of minority groups increases, the probability of "SJW" or variations being used = 1.