“These _____ times” has to be one of my least favorite phrases. “These changing times”, “These trying times”, “These dystopian times”. I dislike it because it makes such a massive assumption about the reader. It’s like a nudge and a wink, saying “we feel the same way”. But you don’t know me, and you don’t know how I feel. It also avoids naming the things which we are talking about. We might both believe that our modern era is dystopian, but we may believe that for completely different reasons. Is it useful to find common ground over ambiguous declarations of what our modern times are like? I say no. It’s bad writing, please stop.
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