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The 34th annual Lake Superior State University List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness was released on Tuesday, 12/30. As usual, the list doesn’t disappoint. This year’s it even contains its first-ever emoticon.

If you don’t know how this list is created, words are nominated by people all over the country, not just the students of the small university in the UP (that’s Upper Penninsula, to you non-Michiganders) of northern Michigan. This year, 15 words were selected from a pool of 5000 nominations.

Some of my personal favorites include:

- Main Street/Wall Street
- Maverick
- First Dude
- Use of the word “Monkey” as a suffix, an example would be if I had named my company “CopyMonkey” instead of “CopyFire.” Says Rogier Landman of Sommerville, MA, “Especially on the Internet, many people seem to think they can make any boring name sound more attractive just by adding the word ‘monkey’ to it.” Rogier, I can’t say I’ve noticed this trend being as rampant as the overuse of “Main Street” but, dagnabbit, I am not going to say I disagree. Monkeys are awesome, but their use as a suffix is certainly suffering from overkill, even if it did take you pointing it out for me to become personally annoyed by it.

In honor of the annual list, I would like to offer up a few words/phrases of my own that I would like to banish:

- Irregardless (what?)
- Low-hanging fruit (just gross. I’m sorry, this is an idiot phrase.)
- Deck (when referring to a PowerPoint presentation)
- Bandwidth (when referring to the amount of resources available)
- Impactful (again, what?)
- Touch base (when used to refer to a meeting, or to the need to follow up on something later)
- Extreme (as in anything prefaced with the word. Extreme poker, bobsledding, baseball, boxing, foosball, whatever. Everything is extreme now. Boooorrriiiinnnggggg.)

And that’s all from me for 2008. Happy New Year, everyone!

Last November, I decided I was finally going to do National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo, as they like to abbreviate it). I’m here to say that what came out of it for me was 50,000 words of completely unpublishable junk (something about a female chef, and two love interests, and blah blah blah), but it was completely and utterly worth it, for the discipline it instilled in me alone. Workng a full-time job as an editor/writer during the day, then coming home to write a minimum of 1666.6666 words every single day for 30 days was challenging and exhausting, and yet I think I’ll probably do it again. The folks at NaNoWriMo are encouraging and supportive throughout the month, and make you undertand that it’s a competition only with yourself. What you produce doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be.

However, for all of you folks out there who are more turned on by competition than a self-contained sense of accomplishment, there’s a new writing contest in town, brought to you by the folks at Toronto’s Broken Pencil magazine. BP is probably the biggest alt culture read in Canada. And now, they’re sponsoring what the Montreal Gazette is calling a “literary survivor” and an “indie writers deathmatch.” Oh dear.

More from the Gazette:

Asked how the deathmatch will work, (Associate Editor Richard) Rosenbaum says “the top eight submissions get posted to our website, where readers can vote for their favourite, and cheer on or hurl insults at the writers and each other, with the writers themselves having to survive round after round of online voting as well as fending off the armies of their opponents’ supporters.”

If after that description anyone is still interested in entering, you can do so if your entry is postmarked by December 31st. Check out Broken Pencil’s website for more information. To the victor go the spoils, including $300 in cash. If you can handle the taunting, anyway.

Australian newspaper The Age featured an article today (or is it tomorrow? They’re hours ahead of us, so…hm. Never mind. It’s in their 12/23 edition.) covering two of my most favorite things. Words and menus. I am a menu addict. I’m the type of person you don’t want tagging along with you to any big city, but NYC in particular. I will stop in front of every restaurant I walk past, scanning for a menu display on an outside wall, so I may then stand there in food rapture, memorizing every word of each glorious dish. The language of food is so rich and diverse that hundreds of books have been written simply to translate for the rest of us just what the heck it all means. You may have noticed, menus are becoming more and more complicated, and beginning to read a bit like bad poetry. And that’s where The Age comes in with their article, “Mincing words.”

The article is essentially a call to bring back the days of simple menus, with descriptions that don’t read like haiku, and are easy to understand even for someone who has never spent even five minutes with The Food Network and Alton Brown (who I happen to love, love, love, but the man does get very wordy and technical. It’s Alton’s world, I’m just living in it). I agree. There’s a way to write a beautiful menu and create amazing dishes without consulting the Oxford English Dictionary (Unabridged). I feel this change would allow the customer to choose a simple bowl of soup without developing a migraine in the process.

One last note:
The final tragedy of ridiculous menus is the 10-minute parade of specials that spews forth from the waiter before even having the opportunity to dull the pain with a cocktail. What a way to ruin the conversational flow. If I want to stop conversation in its tracks, I usually just do it the old-fashioned way. By getting a huge wad of spinach stuck in my front teeth. Here’s to tradition!

In surfing the internet, looking for lists of the most hated words, I found a few that were pretty phenomenal, which I will link to below. My reason for this type of focused internet searching is due to the fact that I feel an uprising is needed to have all of the major publishers remove certain words like “moist,” “nugget,” and “panties” from their dictionaries (Oxford? American Heritage? Do we have an understanding?).

While I’m on the subject of words that generate anxiety or distaste, I’ve noticed lately there are many other words so consistently incorrectly pronounced, it’s all I can do to not run screaming from the room, ears covered, singing “La la la la laaaaa!” to block out the offense (see also: supposably [supposedly], athalete [athlete]). Other nausea-inducing mispronunciations include: “Wash” pronounced as “Warsh,” “Milk” pronounced as “Melk,” “Interesting” pronounced as “Inneresting,” and of course, “Nuclear” pronounced as “Nu-Q-Lur.”

Finally, one regional bit of scary that I’ve run into since moving to Ohio (”Ohiah” if you’re from an hour or more south of Columbus) is the odd choice to omit in speech the “to be” from certain phrases. It makes my hair stand on end. The best and most-used example of this would be “needs done,” as in “Honey, the wash needs done.” I’m getting a chill just typing it. I don’t know how these two short but important words disappeared from the English language around here, but someone needs to find them and bring them back before my head explodes.

But I digress.

I give you…some lists!

The Worst Words

Wordie’s Corporate Buzz Words and Phrases

If you’re on Facebook, you can join the I Hate the Word Moist group. (I have to be honest, I am tempted to go and sign up right now.)

The Most Horrible English Words

The December 9th edition of the Great Falls Tribune features an article on Mike Schwabenbauer, a high school teacher in Simms, Montana, who, according to the paper, is waging a war against unnecessary exclamation points in writing, both in his classes, and within the local business community. This is an issue near and dear to my heart, so the article struck home. My former position as a greeting card editor in the humor area brought this issue to the surface on a regular basis. Our copy database was rife with these unnecessary marks!!! And I quickly learned, that unless the end of the world was upon us, one exclam was more than enough, if it was even necessary at all. I thank my former director, Shelley, for disabusing me of the notion that “!!” or “!!!” or “!?!” was ever something that should be printed on a page (or a card), and know that my writing is the better for her swift and thorough lesson in proper punctuation.

The coming week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review features an essay by Henry Alford about the strange and wonderful things we sometimes find in books. And I’m not talking about the stories lying in wait amongst the pages. Alford is focusing on the bizarre and wonderful items that are stored, left behind, forgotten, or hidden inside the dark recesses of books and later discovered by secondhand bookstores. Such finds have included: a Q-tip, a bullet, a baby’s tooth, porn, and 40 $1000 bills, according to information that Alford received from The Wall Street Journal and AbeBooks.com.

I’ve always known that books held the key to a world of new discoveries, but this essay covers something quite different altogether. And quite interesting as well.

Interesting article today by Eli Saslow of the Washington Post. If you’ve ever wondered, as I have, who it is that keeps the words tripping lightly off of the president-elect’s seemingly silver-encased tongue, Helping to write history is a fascinating read. Especially as the writer, Jon Favreau (no, not that Jon Favreau), is serving in this role at the still-wet-behind-the-ears age of 27.

According to Anivan Chatterjee, founder of Bookfinder.com, anywhere from 98-99% of all books are now out of print. While it makes sense if you think about it (can you imagine what the world would look like if all Borders stores looked like the Library of Congress??), it still feels a little heartbreaking to me. As a bibliophile, the mere thought that there are that many books out there I’m not only unaware of, but also just flat-out unable to get my hands on, gives me a serious case of heartburn.

You can read more about this in the 12/18 Christian Science Monitor, in their article covering the top 10 out-of-print books of all time.