Way, shape or form

The shape or form bits aren’t usually a thing.

If there is only a fixed number of moments before we draw our final breath, a limit to the number of beats our hearts will ever make, why on earth would we waste a single precious second using the expression “not in any way, shape or form”?

For starters, it’s about 50% longer than it needs to be: “in any way” would appear to do an adequate job. Three wasted words here and there soon add up to an awful lot of things that made no sense at all. Then there’s the whole jarring wrongness of it. Shapes and forms? What are you on about? You’re meant to be talking about ways!

Neither eloquent nor evocative, ‘way, shape or form’ is a life-sapping, time-consuming piece of sentence-stultifying clutter, which serves only to fill the time between now and your impending death with even more pointlessly-meaningless words. Not unlike this blog.