Looking ahead, no matter how you feel about it, a university in the United States has added some words and phrases to its “banished” list.
Every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has listed options that would be barred for an entire year.
Over 1,000 everyday terms have entered the list of shame – some more than once.
And this year, GOAT (an acronym for Greatest Of All Time) topped the polls.
Also includes…
inflection point
gas lamp
exit quietly
move forward
Astonishing
absolutely
Does that make sense?
regardless of
That’s it
For the 2023 list, Lake Superior State University judges reviewed more than 1,500 submissions before coming up with the top ten.
A university spokesperson said of the top nominee GOAT: “Many nominees don’t have to be physicists or grammarians to determine the literal impossibility and technical impossibility of the would-be superlative. ambiguity.
“And yet, it’s been given to everyone from Olympic gold medalists to Jeopardy champions.”
Words banned in 2022 include “don’t worry,” “you’re muted” and “wait, what?”
Others over the years include ‘Face to Face’, ‘Information Superhighway’, ‘I Like’, for a country some might say less ‘skilled’ at football commentary than England, oddly outlawed as well” Give 110%”.
Perhaps less surprisingly in 1983, one of the banned words was “Reaganomics” – an overused term at the time to describe the economic policies pursued by US President Ronald Reagan.
President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky
Also predictably, the ban on “Y2K” in 1999, followed by “Millennium” in 2000.
William Jefferson Clinton almost certainly added “Monica Lewinsky” to his “don’t tell” list in 1999, much to his relief.
The university even copyrighted the concept of its Banished Words List “by encouraging the avoidance of overuse, redundancy, contradiction, cliché, illogical, absurd—and otherwise invalid, convoluted, or irritating.”
Enough said.