Linguistic Fears

Speech carries various anxieties. Fear of asserting what is false should count as the most serious–inadvertent falsehood, as opposed to plain lying. The philosophical skeptic taps into this fear, making assertion seem perilous. In the 20th century fear of meaningless utterance became acute: it was all too easy to confuse the grammatical with the meaningful and end up spouting nonsense (the positivists tapped into this fear). This is more disturbing than the skeptical insinuation, because while truth is not transparent we feel that meaningfulness should be. Another linguistic fear, though, is the fear of cliche, of saying the hackneyed and over-used. I’ve always had a dread of this form of linguistic calamity and will go to almost any verbal lengths to avoid cliche–and yet the fear of it still dogs me. How can anyone still permit themselves to utter the phrases “emotional roller-coaster”, “voracious reader”, “like a deer caught in the headlights”, etc? I wouldn’t be caught dead with that stuff coming out of my mouth. What other linguistic fears are there? It would be interesting to compile a list and then impose a taxonomy. Speech is always an arena of anxiety, is it not?