January 02, 2006

Voted off the Linguistic Island Okay, the Rose Parade is a day late, the bowl games drag on through Wednesday, but one New Year's tradition is right on time. It's Lake Superior State University's Annual List of Banished Words...

This year's instant cliches: SURREAL HUNKER DOWN PERSON OF INTEREST COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS UP OR DOWN VOTE BREAKING NEWS DESIGNER BREED FEMA FIRST-TIME CALLER PASS THE SAVINGS ON TO YOU! 97% FAT FREE AN ACCIDENT THAT DIDN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN JUNK SCIENCE GIT-ER-DONE DAWG TALKING POINTS HOLIDAY TREE

posted by wendell 18 years ago
  • Lake Superior State University is Michigan's smallest public university with an enrollment of approximately 3,000 students.
  • Brownie
  • "Surreal" dates from 1917.
  • "De cette alliance nouvelle, car jusqu'ici les décors et les costumes d'une part, la chorégraphie d'autre part, n'avaient entre eux qu'un lien factice, il est résulté, dans 'Parade,' une sorte de surréalisme."
  • C'mon folks, "surreal" is a formerly-perfectly-good word that has been brought down by its recent association with "Surreality TV"... "First-time caller" was a talk radio cliche back in the LATE 1970s when I used to harass some L.A. talk jocks and would call myself a "37th-time caller". Ah, good times.
  • PASS THE SAVINGS ON TO YOU! of 2005!
  • Le surréalisme est le "rayon invisible" qui nous permettra un jour de l’emporter sur nos adversaires. "Tu ne trembles plus, carcasse." Cet été les roses sont bleues; le bois c’est du verre. La terre drapée dans sa verdure me fait aussi peu d’effet qu’un revenant. C'est vivre et cesser de vivre qui sont des solutions imaginaires. L'existence est ailleurs. -- andré breton
  • Filtre de singe!
  • Good quote, but the word is Apollinaire's. I find Breton an enormously overrated writer, although I did enjoy Nadja. Les divers manifestes, pas autant que ça. Ces trucs me rappellent un peu trop le stalinisme, dont la relation la plus proche est le papisme. Et l'on sait où tout ça mène. Putaing con.
  • i wasn't disagreeing with/correcting you, wolof. i just like breton's definition, particularly Cet été les roses sont bleues; le bois c’est du verre.
  • "Hunker down" is a perfectly good dialect term. Damn the clichemeisters who are giving it a bad name!
  • The other banishments seem reasonable enough, but they can have "surreal" when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
  • The word "cliché" no longer seems to mean what I always understood it to mean. I suppose this has the advantage that it is itself unlikely to become a cliché.
  • I must be out of date: "An accident waiting to happen" is the one I still keep hearing. Now pretty much drained of meaning, which must be a sign of clichéhood.
  • Words are like antibiotics. When they're overused improperly, we become resistant to them. I had a dream once where a man was singing about how surreal he was.
  • So I guess I have to burn my close full of Git-R-Done t-shirts?
  • Nah, hang onto 'em till they turn retro in two years, then sell 'em on the Ebay.
  • Make that closet, anyway. And I already used them to clean the rhino's cage.