Please don't say this

I'm begging you.

For the past 38 years Lake Superior State University has compiled a list of words and expressions that should be banished from the English language.

This year, the expression Americans would most like banished is, predictably, "the fiscal cliff." Other top submissions of words and expressions needing banishment:

Kick the can down the road: A child's game has turned into the way legislators express their inability to do their jobs. Rassmussen reports that just 5 percent of Americans think Congress is doing an excellent job. Perhaps it's time voters kicked these do-nothings to the curb.

Double-down: Oh stop it.

YOLO: This expression, which stands for "you only live once," is used by every knucklehead in the country to explain why they narrowly missed being on this year's listing of Darwin award winners. At least the expression "it seemed like a good idea at the time" intimates you won't be doing a similarly stupid action again soon. In this case, the YOLO set appear unrepentant and unwilling to learn.

Spoiler alert: Expression used to ridicule the one member of the YOLO set who has the functioning brain cells to say: "Uh, not a good idea...."

Bucket List: Five-year-old movie about the things two cancer patients wanted to do before they died. See YOLO and get over it already.

Trending: Trend, turned into a verb, is ever so much more annoying than when "Googling," which was a made-up name, became a verb. Hopefully, like pet rocks, this fad of talking up what's trending will fade.

Superfood: This refers to anything that hasn't been triple-processed; hydrogenated; dried; or placed into a plastic wrapper that will keep it fresh for 25 years. People used to call this food.

Guru: Unless you're in an ashram, you are probably referring to an expert.

Are you a creative, innovative professional?

Save me.

Linked In has rummaged through your resume and made a Top Ten list of buzzwords.

1. Creative
2. Organizational
3. Effective
4. Motivated
5. Extensive expertise
6. Track Record
7. Innovative
8. Responsible
9. Analytical
10. Problem solving

A year ago LinkedIn put together the same sort of list of overused buzzwords. It’s no surprise that eight of the ten terms are the same this year, and “creative” remains at the top of the list. Two terms that are no longer on the list: “communication skills” and “dynamic. But those were replaced by the equally trite “responsible” and “analytical.”

Here's a look at buzzword use by geography.

The word that makes me the most crazy is "professional," as in "unemployed, do as little as possible professional."

Going forward, let's not say "going forward"

The excellent Johnson blog at The Economist takes up business cliches, including "going forward."

Usage: A favourite disfavourite of mine, this notionally means "from now on", but often just signifies "now" and is just as often totally redundant:

I am pleased to announced that I have nominated Kiyasha Gonzalez-Guggenheim to be our new head of meatball packaging going forward.

or

Kiyasha's contribution will be particularly valuable in ensuring that all our customers have a consistent and satisfying meatball presentation experience going forward.

Source: Not a clue.

Real meaning: Again, as with "to your point", this is all about having the right attitude. In business it is good to look to the future; one of the most damning subtle indictments you can make of ideas or people is that they are "not forward-looking". Reminding everyone that we are, indeed, going forward and not moving backward is essential in boosting morale. This is especially true after cataclysmic setbacks:

“Our charge going forward is to have realistic, clear goals and to execute them expeditiously.” (New Orleans deputy mayor Cedric Grant, after Hurricane Katrina).

(And by the way—I look forward to "execute expeditiously" becoming widespread enough, going forward, to include on a future version of this list.)

I do note in passing that last year some people set up an entire website devoted to purging their organisation of the phrase "going forward", and reported some success. But in the wider world it seems very much alive.

Circle the wagons!

Metaphor Alert!

Chris Wallace: "And you hear about Democrats talking about House races pulling back and basically throwing some incumbent Democrats under the bus, saying, 'You know, we're just not going to spend money on those races because they're going to lose,' and circling the wagon, building their firewall tighter and tighter, while Republicans are pouring money into an expanding battlefield." Brit Hume: "That is the trajectory of the race. There's no doubt about that, Chris."--"Fox News Sunday," Oct. 17

-- Best of The Web Today

I hope you find this impactful

Here are some more business cliches compiled by Marlys Harris at MoneyWatch. The first group is here.

KPI (Key Performance Indicators)
Important measurements, usually of the immeasurable. Example: "The American Psychological Association recently established KPIs for marriage: the weekly incidence of sexual intercourse plus the number of hours spent watching the same TV shows, minus total minutes bickering over the proper loading of the dishwasher."

Low-Hanging Fruit
Easy to get, though in the end, often not worth the effort. Example: The Taliban might be low-hanging fruit for our production overrun of beard combs."

Human Capital
Human Resources, previously Personnel. Example: "Human Capital is on the fifth floor."

Skill Set or Fit
Qualifications, generally modified by the words "wrong" or "bad," and most often used by Human Capital staffers as an excuse for not hiring somebody. Example: "His inability to speak in tongues obviously makes his skill set wrong for the litigator position." 

Knowledge Economy
An environment in which a person has run up $150,000 in student loans to pay for a law degree only to see jobs exported to India whose citizens are apparently very knowledgeable about the U.S. legal system. Example: "The best job in the knowledge economy is plumbing because nobody with an advanced degree knows how to use Drano." 

Throughput
Not your conclusions, but the mind-numbing numbers and facts you chewed over to get there; information generally demanded by a micro-manager who won't believe that you did the work. Example: "Don't tell me what you've decided about the Taliban beard-comb project; I just want your throughput."

Footprint
Impact, formerly ecological, but now applicable to anything. Example: "Auntie Meg's rear end had a significant footprint on our sofa."

Impactful
Having a large footprint. Example: "Auntie Meg's rear end had a very impactful effect on our sofa."

Let's go offline and brand this post by the end of the day

Oh my, I recall a meeting years ago at IBM in which the leader's brain got stuck, and every sentence was laced with "in this space." That one must still be making the rounds, because it's on the list of business buzzwords that make your eyes bleed gathered by Marlys Harris at MoneyWatch.

She enlisted the help of Brett Good, senior district president of Robert Half International, the global staffing firm, who, she says, "is privy to bujillions of resumes where many of us festoon our mundane jobs and meager accomplishments with business gobbledygook to make them sound more important — or less unimportant."

Here are some from her list.

In Transition
A change from one state of being to another; recession variation: collecting unemployment compensation. Example: "Since the downsizing, I've been in transition." Synonym: doing some consulting.

Brand
Put a good face on. Example: "Okay, so we polluted the groundwater by failing to follow those finicky safety regulations. How should we brand it?"

Space
Industry or field. Example: "I'm in the manufacturing space," "I'm in the waste disposal space," "She's in the adult film space," or "He's in the space exploration space."

Go Offline
Pester me about this after the meeting — or preferably never. "Jones, could we go offline to discuss the $10 underpayment of your expense account reimbursement?"

End of the Day
Formerly 5 to 5:30 p.m., now defined as an uncertain point in the future when everything magically turns out okay. Example. "At the end of the day, the pollution in the groundwater may just drain into the earth's core and become unnoticeable."

Transparent
Open about the facts, but not to be confused with honest. Example: "We've been totally transparent about the 15% fee; we disclosed it on page 37."

Can't Wrap One's Head Around
Unwilling to get into the details or deal with the facts; intellectually lazy. Example: "I can't wrap my head around all this recycling business; Let's throw everything in the dumpster behind Home Depot and let them deal with it."

Bandwidth
Money, staff, computing capacity or other resources. Example: "She lacks the bandwidth to compute compound interest."

Snowclones are the new cliches

The Economist's language blog, Johnson, makes this interesting observation:

Rare are those moments when learning the word for something brings a whole new category into your understanding of the world around you. I had one of those moments recently when I learned the word "snowclone". It is a phenomenon so pervasive and mundane that it never occurs to you to give it a name, but once you discover that there is one, you wonder how you managed without it.

If a cliché is a well-worn fixed phrase, like "he hit the big-time", a snowclone might be described as a meta-cliché: a phrase template, in which one or more of the words is a variable. The term was coined in 2004 in reference to the common journalistic trope of the form "If the Inuit have a hundred words for snow, then X have a hundred words for Y". Once you start looking and seeing, you quickly identify dozens of fixed forms, which are especially common in hurried journalistic writing and in the titles of books, songs and articles, viz.:

X is the new Y
X me no Xs
A few Xs short of a Y
Have X, will travel
What happens in X stays in X
If that's an X then I'm the Y
Man does not live by X alone
and so on.

Shortly after "snowclone" was coined, Language Log (which gave the term its semi-official stamp of approval and has a great selection of posts about it) recorded the snowclone "X is the dark matter of Y", and applied it in the phrase "Snowclones are the dark matter of journalism".

I think this is absolutely true. Snowclones are hidden from view yet exert a huge gravitational pull, tugging the words we write into pre-determined shapes. They are even more pervasive and insidious than clichés, precisely because most of us only dimly realise they exist. Clichés may be the first resort of the lazy writer, but even the moderately careful writer can use a snowclone all too easily.

The most popular marketing buzzwords

Adam Sherk did a bit of research on the press releases at PRWeb and found the number of uses for these buzzwords:

1	leader	161,000
2	leading	44,900
3	best	43,000
4	top	32,500
5	unique	30,400
6	great	28,600
7	solution	22,600
8	largest	21,900
9	innovative	21,800
10	innovator	21,400
11	award winning	11,800
12	exclusive	11,000
13	premier	10,700
14	extensive	10,500
15	leading provider	10,100
16	innovation	9,570
17	real-time	8,030
18	fastest	7,420
19	easy to use	6,850
20	dynamic	6,460
21	state of the art	6,400
22	smart	6,020
23	flexible	5,660
24	cutting edge	5,520
25	biggest	5,460
26	world class	5,340
27	amazing	5,320
28	next generation	4,860
29	revolutionary	4,830
30	sustainable	4,720
31	best practices	4,680
32	leverage	4,600
33	thrilled	4,530
34	robust	4,380
35	delighted	3,560
36	cloud	3,260
37	user friendly	3,190
38	extraordinary	3,090
39	breakthrough	3,010
40	savvy	2,900
41	ROI	2,860
42	transform	2,700
43	seamless	2,540
44	groundbreaking	2,440
45	empower	2,390
46	scalable	2,170
47	one of a kind	2,160
48	proactive	1,810
49	best in class	1,650
50	return on investment	1,570
51	market leading	1,560
52	turnkey	1,450
53	mission critical	1,370
54	strategic partnership	1,360
55	ground breaking	1,320
56	dashboard	1,310
57	iconic	1,220
58	industry standard	1,190
59	never before	1,150
60	re-purpose	1,050
61	ecosytem	1,020
62	win-win	963
63	best of breed	941
64	enterprise class	926
65	empowerment	909
66	magical	853
67	synergy	838
68	out of the box	790
69	feature-rich	757
70	stack	673
71	cross-platform	524
72	value proposition	519
73	well positioned	489
74	disruptive	470
75	hit the ground running	451
76	disruption	417
77	mindshare	415
78	space-age	386
79	bleeding edge	373
80	exit strategy	373
81	customer-centric	369
82	sea change	331
83	sticky	326
84	silo	272
85	synergistic	246
86	client-centric	244
87	outside the box	226
88	paradigm shift	206
89	peak performance	205
90	perfect storm	162
91	organic growth	155
92	top-down	155
93	next-gen	121
94	never been done	110
95	bottom-up	108
96	solution-driven	102
97	secret sauce	91
98	low hanging fruit	69

I would have thought that "low hanging fruit" would have done better. I feel kind of sorry for it.

Somewhere a dog barked

Beware the lazy device.

Writing in Slate, Rosecrans Baldwin points out how often "somewhere a dog barks" appears in novels.

Novelists can't resist including a dog barking in the distance. I've seen it happen across the spectrum—Jackie Collins, William Faulkner, and Chuck Palahniuk: "There was no more rain, just an eerie stillness, a deathly silence. Somewhere a dog barked mournfully." (American Star) "She did not answer for a time. The fireflies drifted; somewhere a dog barked, mellow sad, faraway." (Light in August) "This is such a fine neighborhood. I jump the fence to the next backyard and land on my head in somebody's rose bush. Somewhere a dog's barking." (Choke)  

Why is this?

If a novel is an archeological record of 4.54 billion decisions, then maybe distant barking dogs are its fossils, evidence of the novelist working out an idea. Trains whistle, breezes blow, dogs bark. Dogs that authors bother to describe, or turn into characters, don't pull me out of my reading trance. The thing is, these so-called dogs are nameless and faceless, and frankly I doubt them; it's the curious incident when one actually does come into view. 

However, most authors, Baldwin writes, "employ the trope as a narrative rest stop, an innocuous way to fill space and time; since the bark is hollow, a reader can read anything into it, or nothing at all."

Cliches: join the herd

Martin Amis, the British novelist:

Take the bull by the hand

The late William Safire's rules for writing:

1. No sentence fragments.
2. It behooves us to avoid archaisms.
3. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
4. Don't use no double negatives.
5. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, “Resist hyperbole!”
6. Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
7. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
8. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
9. Writing carefully, dangling participles should not be used.
10. Kill all exclamation points!!!
11. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
12. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
13. Take the bull by the hand and don't mix metaphors.
14. Don’t verb nouns.
15. Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
16. Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.

More annoying words

Word "czars" at Lake Superior State University "unfriended" 15 words and phrases and declared them "shovel-ready" for inclusion on the university's 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.

"The list this year is a 'teachable moment' conducted free of 'tweets,'" said a Word Banishment spokesman who was "chillaxin'" for the holidays. "'In these economic times', purging our language of 'toxic assets' is a 'stimulus' effort that's 'too big to fail.'"

A few of the most egregious:

FRIEND AS A VERB
Came into popularity through social networking websites. You add someone to your network by "friending" them, or remove them by "unfriending" them.

TEACHABLE MOMENT
What might otherwise be known as 'a lesson.'

CHILLAXIN'  
The combination of "chillin" and "relaxin'" into "chillaxin" was an easy pick for banishment. 

Here's the list.

(Thanks, Dick)

Some annoying words

Here are some words that got overused in 2009:

Meme -- Ask five people what this word means, and you'll get five answers, not to mention pronunciations. A good friend, a man of letters, in fact, told me with a straight face it's meh-me (rhymes with hemi). Of course, meme is pronounced with a long "e" and rhymes with steam. According to Merriam-Webster, a meme is "an idea, behavior, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture." Meme may make you look smart for five seconds, but the word has definitely lost its way. It needs about a century in rehab.

Narrative -- As in, "The pro-Obama narrative featured an almost mystically talented young idealist . . ." The word is not bad in itself, especially as an adjective, as in narrative poetry. But why use it when a much simpler word will do? Like story. Doesn't story do the job as well, without the pretense? Apparently not. Especially when talking about President Obama. "Obama narrative" shows up more than 33,000 times on the Internet.

Trending -- If you don't tweet, you're probably clueless here. Last week, for example, I learned that the word "BlackBerry" had been trending in Twitter for 15 hours. I figured out its meaning from context, but made the mistake of asking for confirmation. My bad. I had exposed myself as a fusty old newsosaur. No amount of tech- and Twitter-speak could redeem me. If a word or topic is trending, BTW, it means it's currently in the top-10 most searched items in Twitter. A person could just say it that way. But that's so last year.

Whatever -- This dismissive answer/statement isn't new or even new-ish, but does continue to be an equal-opportunity irritant. It topped the list of most annoying words of 2009 in an October poll.

(Thanks, Lainey)