…and don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out
The 34th annual Lake Superior State University List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness was released on Tuesday, 12/30. As usual, the list doesn’t disappoint. This year’s it even contains its first-ever emoticon.
If you don’t know how this list is created, words are nominated by people all over the country, not just the students of the small university in the UP (that’s Upper Penninsula, to you non-Michiganders) of northern Michigan. This year, 15 words were selected from a pool of 5000 nominations.
Some of my personal favorites include:
- Main Street/Wall Street
- Maverick
- First Dude
- Use of the word “Monkey” as a suffix, an example would be if I had named my company “CopyMonkey” instead of “CopyFire.” Says Rogier Landman of Sommerville, MA, “Especially on the Internet, many people seem to think they can make any boring name sound more attractive just by adding the word ‘monkey’ to it.” Rogier, I can’t say I’ve noticed this trend being as rampant as the overuse of “Main Street” but, dagnabbit, I am not going to say I disagree. Monkeys are awesome, but their use as a suffix is certainly suffering from overkill, even if it did take you pointing it out for me to become personally annoyed by it.
In honor of the annual list, I would like to offer up a few words/phrases of my own that I would like to banish:
- Irregardless (what?)
- Low-hanging fruit (just gross. I’m sorry, this is an idiot phrase.)
- Deck (when referring to a PowerPoint presentation)
- Bandwidth (when referring to the amount of resources available)
- Impactful (again, what?)
- Touch base (when used to refer to a meeting, or to the need to follow up on something later)
- Extreme (as in anything prefaced with the word. Extreme poker, bobsledding, baseball, boxing, foosball, whatever. Everything is extreme now. Boooorrriiiinnnggggg.)
And that’s all from me for 2008. Happy New Year, everyone!
