Rob Hope

Today’s Prompt

If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?

At the risk of being a downer, I despise the phrase “Welcome in.”

I remember the first time I heard it at a Mr. Pickles Sandwich Shop in Templeton, California. That Mr. Pickles is no longer there, but sadly, the grammar horror show legacy remains.

When I first heard it, I thought the employee had not spoken clearly. But that was not the case; subsequent visits indicated that the phrase was here to stay, at least at Mr. Pickles. I ceased going to Mr. Pickles almost immediately, because it was just that irritating. The phrase seems lazy and impersonal, as if we decided to reduce a greeting to the smallest form we could standardize.

Except that was already a thing: “Welcome!” The “in” isn’t even necessary, and yet…there it is. A broken, sad, colloquial phrase not worthy of full meaning or investment.

Nowadays it’s used everywhere, and I continue to clench my teeth and debate if the place I am going is worth the utter spoken failure. What else can one do if they do not wish to be “Welcomed in”?

This post is one of many in my responses to random prompts surfaced by the application that tracks my website statistics, as well as any others I encounter.