With the dawn of every New Year, Lake Superior State University publishes its annual Banished Words List in which a committee selects from words and phrases nominated by the public and designates them as 'banished'. As university PR stunts go, it is remarkably successful, having since 1976 banned nearly 1000 words and phrases, and generated considerable publicity for this small public university in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. To give you an idea of its importance, the link to the Banished Words List is permanently ensconced on the LSSU homepage.

The tradition is basically harmless fun. No one takes seriously the notion that any 'banishment' could or ought to be enforced. Yet I'm increasingly convinced, having followed this tradition for years now, that most of the words the committee selects aren't really worthy of even the mildest censure. For instance, the notion that 'search' should be banned in favour of the neologism 'to google' seems to have things backwards, don't you think? And to ban the phrase 'healthy food' in favour of 'healthful food' (on the grounds that a healthy salmon is a living and swimming one, not one served on a plate) is to go against decades if not centuries of common usage. 'Now playing in theaters' may sound a bit redundant, but it's a useful marketing tool to distinguish a movie that is in theaters from one that is released on DVD. Finally, as far as I can tell, banishing the neologism 'truthiness' popularized and redefined by the comedic genius Stephen Colbert is just sour grapes directed towards several other annual word polls and lists that have designated the term as the Word of the Year.

Now, I freely admit that I have in the past complained about words I hate: for instance, winningest,
the verb to times, biopic, and herbaceutical. Everyone is entitled to their linguistic pet peeves. For instance, Geoff Pullum over at Language Log is obsessed with debunking the (laughably incorrect) myth that Eskimo languages have a superabundance of words for snow, whereas to me it's an amusing fallacy that probably deserves less attention than it gets. In this case, the debunker is a brilliant linguist and the myth is completely fallacious, but it just doesn't push my buttons the way it does him. Fair enough.

The LSSU list, however, seems increasingly to appeal to the worst aspects of linguistic puritanism among English speakers - the kind that holds that acronyms and neologisms are inherently untrustworthy, that phrases must be etymologically pristine to be useful, and that picks on ephemeral linguistic trends that are probably going to disappear by the time of next year's list anyway. Ironically, banning them may just give them further life. Reading it just doesn't give me the same joy that I usually get from thinking about words and language usage - which suggests, to me at least, that there is something wrong with me, or something wrong with the list. I incline towards the latter.

Tags: language