This year’s list of Unwanted Words

6 comments

1. How about “like”? How often is this word uselessly inserted into our language. Start keeping an ear out for this one, and you will be like amazed. :)

2. Inclusive

3. I don’t know about this list. I’m all for banning useless or annoying words from the language — at the point of a bayonet if necessary — but some of these entries are innocuous, like “in harm’s way.”
   Others entires actually are legitimate terms. If someone is “on the ground,” he’s right there where the action is, instead of far away, commenting on events. “Embedded journalist” describes the way reporters covered the Iraq war, as opposed to the journalists who were on their own.
   Then again, they’ve been spreading their pedantry for 28 years, so maybe they’re running out of things to list.

4. They ken not kennings

5. We cannot claim victory until we have purged the hackneyed phrases “frail pontiff” and “ailing pontiff” — cliches since at least ’99.

6. I noticed that the word “metrosexual” was placed on the banned words list. I agree completely. The funny thing is that one conservative Catholic writer took that flip word seriously as some sort of great social trend that he felt compelled to write a condemnation of “metrosexuals.”
   By the way, does this guy qualify as a metrosexual?
   http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/14327.htm

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