Wednesday, January 13, 2010

2010's List of Banned Words


Did you even know there was one? This is the 35th anniversary list issued by Lake Superior State University. Words or short phrases make the list by being submitted and then voted upon. The criteria? They must be mis-used, over-used of generally useless. Thousands of nominations are received annually which are pared down to the worst offenders.

Now don’t think just because something makes the list that it automatically disappears. No, there’s no indication that being banned has any real effect on word usage at all. Things like bailout and carbon-footprint were on last year’s list and are still flung around today.

So here goes, this year’s list:

1. Shovel-ready
2. Transparent/transparency
3. Czar
4. Tweet and any variation thereof
5. App – short for application
6. Sexting
7. Friend, as a verb, also unfriend
8. Teachable moment
9. In these economic times…
10. Stimulus
11. Toxic Assets
12. To big to fail
13. Bromance
14. Chillaxin’
15. Obama, as a prefix

Hmm, okay I agree with a few of these. Others I can’t say as I’ve ever heard anyone I know personally use them. If you need more of a definition for any of them, go here. Opinions?

4 comments:

Anny Cook said...

It will be interesting to see how many of them are around in ten years...

Green Tambourine said...

Please add "At the end of the day..."

Regina Carlysle said...

Maybe these new words and phrases are overused but they will continue to be used for quite awhile, I think. Czar? Please. That one has been around forever.

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