BANISHED WORDS!
I haven’t been writing much lately because I contracted Covid in the last week in December, and getting out of bed in the morning has been the only activity I could actually manage. However, today while idly looking through an article on words and expressions that purists feel should be banished from the lexicon, I actually felt some enthusiasm. Full disclosure, my own “favourite” word to hate is ‘awesome’. If it’s not on a list of words for the trash can, it should be. (Being sick with Covid is making me irritable).
So here is the list of banished words put together by Lake Superior State University, a college that releases an annual list of words and expressions that a committee thinks should be expunged, deleted, eradicated, consigned to the dung heap, and so on.
Here’s the full list of the school’s banished words for this year:
- GOAT (this means Greatest Of All Time)
- Inflection point
- Quiet quitting
- Gaslighting
- Moving forward
- Amazing
- Does that make sense?
- Irregardless
- Absolutely (this is considered ‘bad’ when it’s used to answer a yes/no question as in “Do you think global warming is a threat?” “Absolutely”).
- It is what it is
Apparently the college accepts nominations for the most overused, hated, or excruciating words from all over the world and then selects the most frequently hated. Quite nice in way. It means we’re even globalizing the language everybody uses. Looked at in another way, it seems that we’re moving towards unispeak, which doesn’t really appeal on a “variety is the spice of life” attitude. Anyhooo…..
Along with expressions like “Let’s blue sky this,” meaning let’s use our imaginations; and “Let’s unpack this,” which means let’s analyze that, I think “awesome” is my own pet hate. I also don’t lie “sweet,” meaning thank you, or I appreciate that, or that’s good; and don’t know where the expression “my bad” came from. My students were saying things like that 20 years ago, so those expressions are past their “sell by” date (another expression we could lose).
But I’m getting cantankerous now. I blame it on Covid. What’s your least favourite word?
