Banished Words for 2012

Every year since 1971, Michi­gan’s Lake Supe­ri­or State Uni­ver­si­ty has released a thought­ful and humor­ous “List of Words Ban­ished from the Queen’s Eng­lish for Mis­use, Overuse and Gen­er­al Use­less­ness”. Here is the 2012 (and thir­ty-sev­enth annu­al) edi­tion, for your read­ing enjoy­ment on this New Year’s Day:

AMAZING — Received the most nom­i­na­tions. LSSU was sur­prised at the num­ber of nom­i­na­tions this year for “amaz­ing” and sur­prised to find that it had­n’t been includ­ed on the list in the past. Many nom­i­na­tors men­tioned over-use on tele­vi­sion when they sent their entries, men­tion­ing “real­i­ty” TV, Martha Stew­art and Ander­son Coop­er. It seemed to both­er peo­ple every­where, as nom­i­na­tions were sent from around the U.S. and Cana­da and some from over­seas, includ­ing Israel, Eng­land and Scot­land. A Face­book page – “Overuse of the Word Amaz­ing” – threat­ened to change its title to “Occu­py LSSU” if ‘amaz­ing’ escaped ban­ish­ment this year…

“It’s amaz­ing that you haven’t added that word to your list over the years. Total­ly, absolute­ly, real­ly amaz­ing. Not quite astound­ing, but still amaz­ing.” — Charles Attar­di, Asto­ria, NY

“Although I am extreme­ly hap­py to no longer hear the word ‘awe­some’ used incor­rect­ly and way too often, it appears to me it is quick­ly being replaced with ‘amaz­ing.’ Pay atten­tion and you will no doubt be amaz­ing­ly sur­prised to find that I am right.” — Gre­go­ry Scott, Palm Springs, Calif.

“Peo­ple use ‘amaz­ing’ for any­thing that is nice or heart­warm­ing. In oth­er words, for things that are not amaz­ing.” — Gitel Hes­sel­berg, Haifa, Israel

“Every talk show uses this word at least two times every five min­utes. Hair is not ‘amaz­ing.’ Shoes are not ‘amaz­ing.’ There are any num­ber of adjec­tives that are far more descrip­tive. I saw Martha Stew­art use the word ‘amaz­ing’ six times in the first five min­utes of her tele­vi­sion show. Help!” — Martha Waszak, Lans­ing, Mich.

“Ban­ish it for bla­tant overuse and incor­rect use…to stop my head from explod­ing.” — Paul Crutch­field, Nor­wich, Nor­folk, UK

“The word which once apt­ly described the process of birth is now used to describe such triv­ial things as toast, or the col­or of a shirt.” JP, Comox, British Colum­bia, Canada

“Ander­son Coop­er used it three times recent­ly in the open­ing 45 sec­onds of his pro­gram. My teeth grate, my hack­les rise and even my dog is get­ting annoyed at this sense­less overuse. I don’t even like ‘Amaz­ing Grace’ any­more.” — Sarah How­ley, Kala­ma­zoo, Michigan

“The word has been overused to describe things only slight­ly bet­ter than mun­dane. I blame Martha Stew­art because to her, EVERYTHING is amaz­ing! It has lost its ‘wow fac­tor’ and has reached ‘epic’ pro­por­tions of use. It’s gone ‘viral,’ I say! ‘I’m just sayin’!’ — Alyce-Mae Alexan­der, Mait­land, Florida

BABY BUMP — Although nom­i­nat­ed by many over the years, this phrase came in as a close sec­ond to “amaz­ing” this year.

“This is a phrase we need to final­ly give birth to, then send on its way.” — Mary Stur­geon, Van­cou­ver, British Colum­bia, Canada

“I’m tired of a preg­nan­cy being reduced to a celebri­ty acces­so­ry. Or worse, when less-than-six-pack abs are sus­pect­ed of being one.” — Afton, Port­land, Oregon

“I am so sick of that phrase! It makes preg­nan­cy sound like some fun and in-style thing to do, not a seri­ous choice made by (at the very least) the woman car­ry­ing the child.” — Susan, Tako­ma Park, Maryland

“Why can’t we just use the old tried-and-true ‘preg­nant?’ I nev­er heard any­one com­plain about that descrip­tion.” — Eric, Poca, West Virginia.

SHARED SACRIFICE — “Usu­al­ly used by a politi­cian who wants oth­er peo­ple to share in the sac­ri­fice so he/she doesn’t have to.” — Scott Urbanows­ki, Kent­wood, Michigan

OCCUPY — “ ‘Occu­py Wall Street’ grew to become Occu­py ‘insert name of your city here’ all over the coun­try. It should be ban­ished because of the media overuse and now peo­ple use it all the time, i.e. ‘I guess we will occu­py your office and have the meet­ing there.’ ‘We are head­ed to Grand­ma’s house – Occu­py Thanks­giv­ing is under way.” — Bill Drewes, Rochester Hills, Michigan

“It has been overused and abused even to pro­mote Black Fri­day shop­ping.” — Grant Bar­nett, Palm­dale, California

“Why could­n’t they have used a more palat­able kind, like pecan or peach?” — Bob For­rest, Tempe, Arizona

BLOWBACK — Some­times exchanged with “push­back” to mean resistance.

“ ‘Blow­back’ is used by cor­po­rate (types) to mean ‘reac­tion,’ when the word ‘reac­tion’ would have been more than suf­fi­cient. Exam­ple: ‘If we send out the press release, how should we han­dle the blow­back from the com­mu­ni­ty?’ ” — John, Los Ange­les, California

MAN CAVE — “Overused by tele­vi­sion home design and home buy­ing shows, has trick­led down to sit­coms, com­mer­cials, and now has to be endured dur­ing inter­ac­tions with real estate peo­ple, neigh­bors and co-work­ers.” — Jim, Flagstaff, Arizona

“It is not just over-used, it is offen­sive to we males who do not wish to hun­ker (anoth­er awful word, often mis­used) down in a room filled with stuffed ani­mal heads, an unnec­es­sar­i­ly large flat-screen TV and Hoot­ers mem­o­ra­bil­ia. Not every man wants a reclin­er the size of a 1941 Packard that has a cool­er in each arm and a hol­ster for the remote. So please, assign ‘man cave’ to the lex­i­co­graph­ic scrap heap where it so right­ly belongs.” — David Hol­lis, Hub­bardsville, New York

THE NEW NORMAL — “The phrase is often used to jus­ti­fy bad trends in soci­ety and to con­vince peo­ple that they are pow­er­less to slow or to reverse those trends. This serves to reduce par­tic­i­pa­tion in the polit­i­cal process and to fos­ter cyn­i­cism about the abil­i­ty of gov­ern­ment to improve peo­ple’s lives. Some­times the phrase is applied to the ero­sion of civ­il lib­er­ties. More often, it is used to describe the sor­ry state of the U.S. econ­o­my. Often hosts on TV news chan­nels use the phrase short­ly before intro­duc­ing some self-help guru who gives glib advice to the unem­ployed and oth­er peo­ple hav­ing finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties.” — Robert Brown, Raleigh, North Carolina

PET PARENT — “Can a human being tru­ly be a par­ent to a dif­fer­ent species? Do pet ‘own­ers’ not love their pets as much pet ‘par­ents’ do? Are we equat­ing pet own­er­ship with slave hold­ing? This cloy­ing­ly cor­rect term is capa­ble of rais­ing my blood sug­ar.” — Lynn Ouel­lette, Buf­fa­lo, New York

WIN THE FUTURE — A polit­i­cal phrase worn wher­ev­er you look – to the left (Pres­i­dent Oba­ma) or the right (Newt Gingrich).

“On its very face, it’s an emp­ty, mean­ing­less phrase. It basi­cal­ly says that any­one who oppos­es any­thing meant to ‘win the future’ must want to ‘lose the future,’ which is high­ly unlike­ly. But, hey, you may already be a win­ner.”  — Jim Eisen­mann, Madi­son, Wisconsin

TRICKERATION — “Why? Why? Why? This one seems to be the fla­vor du jour for foot­ball ana­lysts. What’s wrong with ‘trick’ or ‘trick­ery?’ No doubt, next year’s mod­el will be ‘trick­er­a­tionism.’ ”-  Gene Bering, Semi­nole, Texas

“A made-up word used by foot­ball ana­lysts to describe a trick play. Sounds unin­tel­li­gent. Per­haps they’ve had a few too many con­cus­sions in the foot­ball world to notice.” — Car­rie Hansen, Grayling, Michigan

GINORMOUS — “No need to make a gigan­tic (idiot) out of your­self try­ing to find an enor­mous word for ‘big.’ ” — Coulombe, San­ford, Florida

“This com­bi­na­tion of gigan­tic and enor­mous makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck every time I hear it. Each utter­ance reminds me of the high school drop-out that first used this offen­sive word in my pres­ence.” — Gina Bua, Van­cou­ver, Washington

“This word is just a made-up com­bi­na­tion of two words. Either word is suf­fi­cient, but the com­bi­na­tion just sounds ridicu­lous.” — Jason, Andover, Maine

THANK YOU IN ADVANCE — “Usu­al­ly fol­lowed by ‘for your coop­er­a­tion,’ this is a con­de­scend­ing and chal­leng­ing way to say, ‘Since I already thanked you, you have to do this.’ ” — Mike Clo­ran, Cincin­nati, Ohio

Lists for pre­vi­ous years are avail­able on Lake Supe­ri­or’s site.

We’d com­plete the list above by adding sev­er­al more obnox­ious phras­es that we’d like to see ban­ished for mis­use and gen­er­al uselessness:

GURU — This word, which orig­i­nates from Hin­di, is sup­posed to mean spir­i­tu­al guide or leader with great intel­lect.  But these days, it’s being mis­used by the media to refer to peo­ple who are pro­lif­ic at some­thing in par­tic­u­lar. For instance, Apple’s Jony Ives has been labeled “design guru”, Harley Paster­nak has been called “star diet guru” and the Asso­ci­at­ed Press likes to call Tim Eyman “ini­tia­tive guru”. Enough already! None of these peo­ple are gurus. Time to ban­ish this word.

SOME WOULD SAY and SOME SAY — This Fox­ism, which comes in mul­ti­ple fla­vors (all com­prised of weasel words), has been in use for more than a decade on the Repub­li­can Par­ty’s offi­cial cable news net­work, head­ed by Roger Ailes. It is a pho­ny jour­nal­ist’s best friend. Con­sid­er this exam­ple from Decem­ber 2nd, uttered by Gretchen Carl­son: “Some would say that it’s the unions that have crip­pled the U.S. econ­o­my and led to the Unit­ed States’ debt.” The base­less innu­en­do sym­bol­ized by “some would say” exem­pli­fies every­thing that’s wrong with big media today.

JOB CREATOR — Yet anoth­er phrase cooked up in the Frank Luntz lan­guage kitchen. It has become the right wing’s pre­ferred way of talk­ing about the super rich, who already have their for­tunes made and  may no longer even work for a liv­ing. “You don’t cre­ate jobs by mak­ing life dif­fi­cult for job cre­ators,” Luntz says in his newest book, pub­lished in mid-2011. Repub­li­can mem­bers of Con­gress have been using this line almost ver­ba­tim all year long on Sun­day talk shows and op-eds, despite there being no cred­i­ble evi­dence that tax cuts for the wealthy lead to increased pri­vate sec­tor hiring.

TWO-THIRDS MAJORITY — An unhelp­ful oxy­moron. A two-thirds vote may be a super­ma­jor­i­ty, but it’s not a major­i­ty, just as a sub­ma­jor­i­ty is not a major­i­ty. Major­i­ty, major­i­ty vote and major­i­ty rule mean fifty per­cent plus one. No more, no less.

LET ME BE PERFECTLY CLEAR —  Heard fre­quent­ly in speech­es by Barack Oba­ma (and oth­er politi­cians), this is a longer, more redun­dant ver­sion of “Let me be clear”, which is itself filler in the tra­di­tion of “Make no mis­take about it” (ban­ished in 2003). We’d like to see a break from this one for a while.

OFFER ONLY AVAILABLE FOR A LIMITED TIME — Often pref­aced with the word hur­ry. As in, hur­ry up and buy this thinga­ma­jig so we can sell you some­thing else with our next hol­i­day sale.

INCENTIVIZE — Anoth­er invent­ed buzz­word that has out­lived its use­ful­ness. Nom­i­nat­ed by a read­er in the com­ment thread of last year’s post about the Ban­ished Words List.

This year’s list from LSSU is pret­ty strong. We espe­cial­ly applaud the inclu­sion of “the new nor­mal”, a phrase we’ve come to abhor. “Man cave” is also more than wor­thy of ban­ish­ment… as is “win the future”, which lacks con­vic­tion and implies that out-com­pet­ing oth­er coun­tries and peo­ples is the key to pros­per­i­ty, rather than coop­er­a­tion. We need to escape from the dichoto­my of win­ning and losing.

As the Unit­ed Nations’ end­less cli­mate talks have demon­strat­ed, seem­ing­ly intractable prob­lems that affect all of human­i­ty will sim­ply remain intractable as long as we are stuck in a mind­set of com­pe­ti­tion rather than coop­er­a­tion. Here’s hop­ing that we begin to get unstuck in 2012.

Hap­py New Year!