Words and phrases I hate

Kudos

Any of the following could have appeared in the letters column of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

1. Kudos go to George for slaying the dragon.
2. Kudos goes to George for slaying the dragon.
3. Kudos to George for slaying the dragon.

Today the natural habitat of the word "kudos" seems to be letters columns, and the preferred usage is (3). The form (1) is wrong, (2) is ostentatiously announcing that you know (1) is wrong, and (3) is hedging your bets. Also, the construction in (3) is usually reserved for things like "Glory to God". Avoid the word. (In English. In Greek, feel free.)

Fowler believed that Americans were prone to using the form (1). I've only spotted it once in the wild, in an editorial in the Nation.

Epicentre

Or epicenter; this is not about the American spelling of English words. In referring to an earthquake, the word is of course unexceptionable. Saying "The epicentre of the riot was Mornington Crescent" would be correct if the riot started in the Mornington Crescent tube station, but perhaps unwise. Using that sentence to mean "The riot started in Mornington Crescent, and it was, ooh, I don't know, earth-shattering" is silly.

You can't prove a negative

This is blatantly false, unless you believe you can't prove anything at all. If you can prove that 2 + 2 is equal to 4, you can prove that 2 + 2 is not unequal to 4. A more serious mathematical example is "the square root of 2 is irrational". Here "irrational" is defined to mean "not rational", so we can be pretty sure that if we ever manage to make a sensible distinction between positive and negative statements, "the square root of 2 is irrational" will be on the negative side.

The serious deployment of this phrase is as the spoken or unspoken justification of "you can't prove that God doesn't exist". Well, balderdash. Of course I can, provided my challenger will agree on the meaning of "God exists". I shall deal with only two possible interpretations, but I think the other hundreds or thousands of possibilities can be easily handled.

1. Something created the universe. We call him, her or it God, but he, she or it hasn't been heard from since. I think that this was the Deist position, and may be held by some Unitarians today. No evidence can be given against this, but it makes no difference whether it's true or false, so Occam's Razor kicks in and this God does not exist.
2. God created the universe. He cares about His creation, listens to His creatures' prayers, and is generally benevolent. This is contradicted by the most cursory examination of the world we live in. The classic counterexample is the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, but there have been many before and many since; this belief is indefensible.

Many religious people adopt the position (1) in argument with atheists, while actually believing (2). Nobody is fooled.

It's just a theory

Yeah, right. Like the theory of relativity is "just a theory". This, of course, is usually heard from the religious wingnuts about the theory of evolution. Let's be clear: before Darwin, biology was on a par with stamp-collecting. Darwin gave the subject a theoretical basis, thus making it an intellectually respectable discipline. In general, theories are what we aim at; establishing the facts to support them can be worthy of a Nobel prize, but it's in service of the theory.