Skip to content ↓

“My Own Personal”

This phrase is one of my pet peeves. It is used with alarming frequency and I seem to hear it wherever I go these days.

The other day I read a quote where someone said “my own personal heart is breaking.”

I guess he really wanted to stress that he didn’t break anyone else’s heart. Not only was it his heart (not your heart), but it was also his own (make no mistake about it…it was NOT your heart – he owns this one) and it was his personal heart (it’s a private heart – not open for public viewing). Perhaps he just wanted to add clarity to the situation. Or, more likely, he just used an awful cliche.

This phrase is doubly redundant and repeats itself, saying the same thing again and again and over and over. My own personal opinion is that you just shouldn’t use it. So please don’t.


  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (December 17)

    A La Carte: The Virgin Mary and modern therapeutic culture / Relational heresy and doctrinal heresy / The darkness does not win / How does God deliver from pain by pain? / Christmas with your adult children / and more.

  • Do you know who God says you are?

    Identity matters for at least two key reasons. First, understanding our identity—our true God-given identity—is vital to understand why we exist and what we’re to do in life, as it is likewise essential for framing a fitting perspective of others.

  • A Collection of Random Thoughts on Christian Living

    A Collection of Random Thoughts on Christian Living

    Not every thought makes a good article and sometimes an entire article can be distilled down to a single thought. For those reasons, I like to occasionally create what I have created here–a roundup of brief, random thoughts about Christian living. Some of these are original and some are drawn from articles I’ve written in…

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    A La Carte (December 16)

    A La Carte: Have you lost the ability to think deeply? / Does God command me to trust my spouse? / Thoughts on suicide / Preaching from a manuscript / God is not in a good mood / Kindle deals / and more.

  • Undermines

    Undermining the Bible

    There is an entire sector of the publishing industry that is dedicated to undermining people’s confidence in the Bible. Many of these books shoot to the top of the bestseller lists with their novel conspiracies about the Bible’s origins, their theories about its hidden secrets, or their conviction that it is a mess of contradictions.

  • A La Carte Collection cover image

    Weekend A La Carte (December 14)

    A La Carte: Male and female forever? / The shortcomings of Jordan Peterson / The thief who steals joy / Letter to a progressive Christian / The weary world rejoices / and more.