Figures of speech

what's interesting here is your identification of the topic with two groups that almost certainly contribute the most to the enrichment and extension of the day-to-day UK English language - black culture and teenagers. These two areas yield words and phrases that are brilliant, and the mutations you get with teens reappropriating stuff is great. I don't find that stuff annoying at all and I really get the sense of the language expanding (and contracting again as words become dated and are replaced).

What really gets most people's goat though is largely American-derived. Two areas can be seen to be stunting the language's growth rather than pushing it to develop: internet-speak and corporate-speak. At the corporate level it takes on a clearly Orwellian function as it is used for no other reason than to force people to conform. I'm not sure if you've ever worked in an environment where this kind of language is rife Scott - I've a feeling you have managed to avoid it, and I envy you if you have - but it is odious and painful for anyone who has a mind of their own to sit through days of hearing words, phrases and contructions employed to promote this sense of a special, serious world of "being at work". "Can you action that?" instead of "Can you do that?"; "Can I have that by close of play?" rather than " Can I have that by the end of the day?"; "flag up", "just giving you a heads up", "close off" - the list goes on and on, all meaningless, charmless phrases whose perpetuation is enabled by the complicity of people who, fundamentally, wish to be able to feed their family and pay their mortgage. For those few people who don't buy into it, who wish to laugh out loud at the ridiculousness of verbs like "to farm" or "to leverage", the simplest meeting about the month ahead becomes utterly soul-destroying.

^ Thats a familiar worst/best case scenario