Rishi Sunak: BBC suffer blunder with word cloud

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Throughout December, the world’s dictionaries and newspapers set about picking their most relevant and novel words of the year. In 2022, Collins decided upon “permacrisis”, Cambridge went with “homer”, while Oxford allowed the public to vote for the first time and ended up with “Goblin Mode”. Turning the trend on its head, Lake Superior State University (LSSU) instead enlists a panel of judges to determine the very worst terms and phrases. Do you use any of this year’s winning losers?

LSSU has selected the ten words that were the most “misused, overused, and useless” throughout 2022 and vetoed their continued use in 2023.

Every New Year’s Eve since 1976, the college in the Northeastern US state of Michigan has released additions to its “tongue-in-cheek” Banished Words List – now with over 1,000 entries in total.

The university has gone as far as to copyright the concept, with the aim to “uphold, protect, and support excellence in language by encouraging avoidance of words and terms that are overworked, redundant, oxymoronic, clichéd, illogical, nonsensical-and otherwise ineffective, baffling, or irritating.”

This year, LSSU said it received over 1,500 nominations from across the US and countries all over the world, including the UK, the Netherlands, New Zealand, India, France, Australia and Canada.

The word that topped the poll in 2023 was in fact an acronym: “G.O.A.T.” – standing for Greatest Of All Time. 

A spokesperson for the university said: “The many nominators didn’t have to be physicists or grammarians to determine the literal impossibility and technical vagueness of this wannabe superlative. Yet it’s bestowed on everyone from Olympic gold medallists to Jeopardy champions.”

According to Grammarphobia.com, the term was first applied to Muhammad Ali in 1992, whose wife promptly incorporated G.O.A.T. Inc. to consolidate the legendary boxer’s intellectual properties. 

Over the years since, the title has been awarded to the likes of Roger Federer, Tiger Woods, Lionel Messi, Serena Williams and Michael Schumacher among others.

According to the 2023 Banished Words List press release, critics now complain the label has become an “indiscriminate flaunt” that is routinely “applied to everyone and everything from athletes to chicken wings.”

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In second place on the list is “inflection point” – described by the judges as a “mathematical term that entered everyday parlance and lost its original meaning.” 

This was followed by “quiet quitting”, the much-discussed phenomenon of employees doing the bare minimum required of them.

Fourth on the list came “gaslighting”, exiled from the language due to “overuse” that “disconnects the term from the real concern” of troubling psychological manipulation. US dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster may take issue with this particular entry, having chosen it as their 2022 word of the year.

Rounding out this year’s top ten are “moving forward”, “amazing”, “absolutely”, “does that make sense?”, “irregardless” and “it is what it is”.

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“Words and terms matter. Or at least they should,” said Peter Szatmary, the university’s executive director of marketing and communications.

“Especially those that stem from the casual or causal. That’s what nominators near and far noticed, and our contest judges from the LSSU School of Arts and Letters agreed,” he added.

Last year, banned words and common phrases included “wait, what?”, “no worries”, and “asking for a friend”.

There have been many notable winners over the decades, the very first being “at this point in time” in 1976, all the way to “COVID-19” in 2021 via “ball park figure” in 1980, “24/7” in 2000 and “break the internet” in 2016.

Other entries have spanned from the presidential – from 1983’s “Reaganomics” to 2018’s “covfefe” – to the adolescent, with 2013’s “YOLO” and 2015’s “bae”.

LSSU President Dr. Rodney S. Hanley in the press release: “Our linguists, editors, and philosophers, comics, gatekeepers, and pundits didn’t succumb to quiet quitting when laboring over rife miscommunication. Rather, they turned in discerning opinions about rampant verbal and written blunders with equal parts amusement, despair, and outrage. 

“But our nominators insisted, and our Arts and Letters faculty judges concurred, that to decree the Banished Words List 2023 as the GOAT is tantamount to gaslighting. Does that make sense?

“Irregardless, moving forward, it is what it is: an absolutely amazing inflection point of purposeless and ineptitude that overtakes so many mouths and fingers.”

Anyone can nominate a term for banishment on the 2024 list by going to lssu.edu/banishedwords

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