US university issues list of useless words

KANSAS CITY, Thursday

If you recently tweeted about how you were chillaxin for the holiday, take note: 15 particularly over- or mis-used words and phrases have been declared “shovel-ready” to be “unfriended” by a US university’s annual list of terms that deserve to be banned.

After thousands of nominations of words and phrases commonly used in marketing, media, technology and elsewhere, wordsmiths at Lake Superior State University on Thursday issued their 35th annual list of words that they believe should be banned.

Tops on the Michigan university’s list of useless phrases was “shovel-ready.” The term refers to infrastructure projects that are ready to break ground and was popularly used to describe construction projects felled by stimulus funds from the Obama administration.

And speaking of stimulus, that word – which was applied to government spending aimed at boosting the economy – made the over-used category as well, along with an odd assortment of Obama-related constructions like Obamacare and Obamanomics.

“We say Obamanough already,” said the committee. Also ripe for exile is “sexting,” shorthand for sexy text messaging, a habit that caused trouble for many public figures last year. Similarly, list makers showed distaste for tweeting, retweeting and tweetaholics, lingo made popular by users of the Twitter networking website.

And do not even get them started on the use of friend as a verb, as in: “He made me mad so I unfriended him on Facebook,” an Internet social site. Male acquaintances need to find another word instead of “bromance” for their friendships, and the combination of “chillin” and “relaxin’” into “chillaxin” was an easy pick for banishment.

“Toxic assets,” referring to financial instruments that have plunged in value, sickened list makers, along with the poorly defined “too big to fail” which has often been invoked to describe wobbly US banks.

Economic times

Similarly, “in these economic times” was deemed overdue for banishment. Also making the list –“transparency,” typically used, contributors said, when the situation is anything but transparent.

One list contributor wanted to know if there was an “app,” short-hand for “application” popularised by the mobile iPhone’s growing array of software tools, for making that annoying word go away.

Rounding out the list,–“czar”, as in drug czar, car czar, housing czar or banished word czar. “Purging our language of ‘toxic assets’ is a ‘stimulus’ effort that is ‘too big to fail,’” said a university spokesman.