I enjoyed reading John Sutherland's article in G2 today as I ate my lunchtime sandwich, How language is literally losing its meaning, occasioned by the admission to the Oxford English Dictionary of the abuse of the word literally to add vague emphasis to a statement.
He also inveighs against the misuse of robust. A few minutes later, back at my desk, I recieved notice of a new article. The first sentence of the abstract reads thus, This study utilizes an informatics tool to analyze a robust literature search service in an academic medical center library.
What on earth is a robust literature search service? Why would anyone offer one that wasn't?
The article in question is this:
Hinton EG, Oelschlegel S, Vaughn CJ, Lindsay JM, Hurst SM, Earl M.
Building and evaluating an informatics tool to facilitate analysis of a biomedical
literature search service in an academic medical center library.
Med Ref Serv Q. 2013;32(3):235-43