Words We Wouldn’t Miss
Every year, Lake Superior State University issues its list of trite, euphemistic or just plain useless words to be banned from the English language. Chad, baby boomers and detente are still serving time in LSSU’s verbal prison. This year’s stupid words have something to do with being shocked and awed in harm’s way holding a smoking gun and owning bling-bling, which is a majorly dumb word even if you don’t know it means flashy jewelry or luxury items.
Banning words from way up in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., which isn’t even pronounced as it’s spelled, may indicate more about what’s left for Lake Superior academics to do in winter, when the mosquitoes are fewer. Censorship is a lose-lose situation. But words -- and attempts by free people to assemble them into coherent, expressive thoughts -- can reveal much about a society. Just as what that society doesn’t say can also reveal.
Perhaps because of the inexorable ease of e-mail, with its anarchic attitude toward rules, its abbreviation adoration (lol) and false presumed privacy, much current conversational English seems ostentatiously casual and blithely lazy. It’s also annoying in extremis to people trying to convey an actual message, not merely fill conversational face-time. D’ya hear what we’re saying?
Many words make fine banning candidates. Does anyone not taking serious medicine actually crave thinking about the top line inside the box while traveling in the slow lane? Could anyone be proactive working 8/5 or maybe 6.2/5, using an ignorance-based plan to destroy core competencies and develop worst practices for an old paradigm? In your occasionally humble opinion, when touching base with distant friends or syncing up with bean-counting colleagues, even offline, at crunch time do you find their game plans or mind-sets merely appearance-driven and boss-focused, speaking quite frankly? Like we say, that’s empowerment. Or is it synergy? And while we’re at it, why isn’t grande the largest cup at Starbucks?
As a benchmark of social tastes and the ability to debase through overuse, we also hate the word hate. Hate is profound, elemental, unreasoning, like a playground fight in grade school. Grown-ups cannot hate strawberry milkshakes. Leverage can be a good word, though not in every other sentence. Irregardless is a meaningless double negative deserving banishment. Don’t even not go there. Forced to resign? Isn’t that really fired in gift wrap? And what’s with deplaning? Moving forward, even at the beginning of the day, we could also do without btw, by the way. No problemo.
