The University, which started banishing words in 1976 as a ploy to get publicity, issues its list on New Year’s Day each year. The tongue-in-cheek list, which is in its 33rd edition, is eagerly awaited by language enthusiasts across the world.
Word-watchers are encouraged to target pet peeves from every day speech, as well as from news, education, technology, advertising, politics and sports. This year the University’s website got over 2,000 nominations.
Heading the 2008 list of banished words and phrases is “post-9/11”, which has been to put to sleep for its overuse.
Chazz Miner of Michigan, who nominated the phrase for banishment, had this to say: “Our post-9/11 world is probably used more than AD, BC or Y2K time references. You’d think the US didn’t have jet fighters, nuclear bombs and secret agents, let alone electricity — ‘pre-9/11’!”
Next on the list is “blank (orange) is the new blank (black)”. Lawrence Mickel of Connecticut, who wants the phrase deleted from the LSSU vocabulary, said, “‘Cold is (not) the new hot’, nor is ‘70 the new 50’”.
The idea behind such comparisons was originally good, but we’ve all watched them spiral out of reasonable uses into ludicrous ones and it’s now time to banish them from use. “Or, to phrase it another way, ‘Originally clever advertising is now the new absurdity!’”
In order to get good media coverage, the banishment list is released each year on New Year’s Day, traditionally considered to be a slow news day. The many spins on a 1960 phrase “Black Friday” (“Cyber Monday”, “Wet Wednesday”) were nominated by Carl Marschner of Michigan. The phrase “perfect storm”, overused by media pundits on evening shows, also joined the list of banned words. So has “webinar” (a seminar on the web).
“Yet another non-word trying to worm its way into the English language due to the Internet. It belongs in the same school of non-thought that brought us ‘e-anything’ and ‘i- anything’,” Scott Lassiter of Texas wrote in his submission.
“Organic”, which is increasingly being used not only to describe food but also “computer products”, has been knocked off too. “When will they begin marketing T-shirts as organic?” asked an angry student.
The word “wordsmith” and the derivative “wordsmithing” were also knocked off along with “author” and “authored”.
“Surge”, which has now come to mean increasing the number of troops in Iraq, was nominated by Michael F Raczko. “Give me the old days, when it referenced storms and electrical power,” he wrote.
“Give back”, referring to charitable works, “back in the day”, “random” and “decimate” are also on the list. “‘Decimate’ has been turned upside down.
It means “to destroy one tenth”, but people are using it to mean “to destroy nine-tenths”, observed David Welch in his nomination. “Sweet”, “emotional”, “under the bus”, “waterboarding”, “pop” and “it is what it is” a pointless phrase which “accomplishes the dual feat of adding nothing to the conversation while also being phonetically and thematically redundant” also stood banished.
