Weeds and other things in the wrong places

Weeds have no place to grow on my balcony. They don’t dare show their heads in the two pots bearing minature lime trees. The garden container given to me by my son, with three Swiss Chards ringed by lettuces, is taboo. And so is the pot of cactii.

Ross Gay writes about bind weeds in The Book of Delights. Eileen Susan writes about Cape weeds. I’m not familiar with either of these weeds.

I think instead of Paterson’s Curse (picture above) also known as Calamity Jane. This purple flowering plant fills whole paddocks with beauty and toxins lethal to grazing livestock. Australian farmers hate it. Bindi Bindi also comes to mind. This nasty prickly plant makes lawns into horror strips in early summer.

Lantana and agapanthus grow as cultivated plants in Western Australia. In the east of Australia, they’re despised weeds.

Lantana

Missing the weeds

One of the few downsides of apartment living is the lack of a personal garden. There’s a communal vegetable garden on the roof here, but it is not the same as one’s own plot, however small.

I miss weeding a garden in spring. I miss bringing order to flower and vegetable patches after the winter rain has forced weed growth. Beds free of weeds lend themselves to planting new things to flourish over summer and autumn. I miss the feeling of damp soil on my hands.

My father used to describe weeds as plants growing in the wrong place. There’s always a race to pull them up before they flower and seed.

Weedy words

But weeds aren’t the only things I notice in the wrong places. For example, there are all those things that need to be decluttered to make space.

Then there are weedy words. Dad always corrected us when we used words wrongly. His pet hate was ‘going to go’. He used to say, ‘If you are going, say so. No need to talk nonsense.’

So now, when I think of weeds, I’m most likely to think of word weeds. They seem more common in our language now than ever before.

Examples of word weeds

Here’s a list of word weeds that have crept into every day speech, even on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, once the gold-standard in this country for proper use of language.

• ‘Take a look,’ or ‘take a listen‘. Whatever happened to look and listen? I love one word sentences! I even heard an exhortation to ‘have a grow’! during the ABC‘s Gardening Australia program. Such an odd expression!
• ‘Sit down,’ ‘lie down, ‘fall down,’ as if there could be any other direction to sit, lie or fall. Except to fall over, if the action involves an object like a chair.
• Stand up is in the same category, except in the opposite direction.
• Then there are therefore and nevertheless and similar words favoured in academic writing, but out of vogue in speech.
• Whatever sits in a special category because it is such a dismissive word, a bit like ‘it is what it is’.
• Very and really. Many other words express these better. Sometimes they are downright silly: very unique, for example.
• I think and I believe. Obviously, If one makes a statement in writing, it’s something you think or believe. No need for the introduction.
• Going forward. This would be among my most despised phrases, but often used by politicians. ‘Going forward’ is used at the end of discussions about plans. It probably means ‘in the future’ as if plans can be past or present.

Pulling them out

I try to get rid of these words and phrases in my writing. It’s a never ending task. Many other nonsense words come under my editor’s pen when I edit what I’ve written. And the pleasure of getting rid of those words is indescribable.

Do you have words that act like weeds in your conversation or writing? Please share them in the comments below.

Acknowlegements

Thanks to Don Watson and his book, Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words: Contemporary Cliches, cant and Management Jargon, for the idea of words in the wrong places, and to my friend Helen, who carefully weeded out unnecessary words in my PhD thesis and taught me so much.

This is another piece written in response to a prompt in an intensive twelve week online writing course with the title, ‘For the Joy and the Sorrow’. You can read other blogs prompted by this course here and here.