RedState’s Year-End List of Banished Words and Phrases from the Queen’s English — Open for Nominations!
By: conservativecurmudgeon (Diary) | December 25th, 2013 at 05:50 PM |
Michigan’s most iconic PR man was likely the late, Great Bill Rabe (pronounced “Ray-bee”) of Lake Superior State College. And, in a state full of automobile hucksters from David E. Davis to Harvey Earl, that’s saying a lot.
But, all through the 70′s and 80′s, the joyous Bill could be heard any given morning swapping clever repartee and jocularity with JP McCarthy on WJR (“The Great Voice of the Great Lakes!”) in Detroit. Rabe took an obscure collegiate out-growth of Michigan Tech, and turned it into a powerhouse in its own right, just with his clever press-releases and other non-sense. In addition to sponsoring the International Stone Skipping Tournament, or the annual Burning of the Snowman on the first day of Spring, Rabe’s LSSU “Unicorn Hunters” would issue its annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.
By the time Bill retired in the late 1980′s, the List of Banished Words would get top billing from the likes of the Associated Press, and ABC Radio News at this precise time, when it was going over it’s “year end” lists. It was an important feature of the cultural landscape, that I think you, dear readers of RedState, will appreciate– and we want to appropriate as our own.
So, without further introduction, or ado, here are my nominees for Banishment:
1) “Reproductive Justice”. Is there a more Orwellian name for a ghoulish procedure like abortion? An abortion, by definition, is not “reproductive”, and, from the standpoint of the murdered baby, hardly anything approaching “justice”. I don’t think there is a more euphemistic term in the present day idiom, except that term that comes in at Number 2:
2) “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act”. Is there a law with a name that describes any better what the actual opposite outcome of it’s passage is? Patients are losing protection every single day, and it is the most horrendously overpriced bit of legislation passed in many a year: $680 million for a web page that doesn’t work? $800 billion stolen from people that have been studiously sending in money to Medicare in their FICA envelopes? This term is forever banished– but “Obamacare” fills the void quite well.
3) “Marriage Equality“. Just what we need. But, come to think of it, I think I want to be married to Donald Trump, and so should everyone else. That would make things equal… Banished to the far hinterlands of North Oakland, where, maybe someone can get it retooled.
4) “Sustainable”. This word is showing up everywhere, including the packaging of large-screen plasma televisions. Sustained overuse of this word has resulted in its banishment.
5) “Navigator“. All rightee, then. We now need a person that, once upon a time, was only needed to circumnavigate the uncharted oceans, or the trajectory of a passenger jet. Now we need one to lead us through the labyrinth of the Federal Sixth Circle of Hell. Dictatorships need navigating. Free Societies don’t. Banished, be gone!
6) “LGBT Community“. Especially now that I’ve also seen it with a “Q” at the end, (which I, silly me, thought stood for “queer”, but, amongst the smart set means “questioning”), LGBT too often reminds me of LBFM, which, as we all know, stands for “Light Beer from Miller”.
7) “Metric“. Never having been an advocate of the Metric System, I am now even more against it… especially since the now well-overused term “metric” has been substituted when people really meal “goal”. As in Jay Carney, spewing his best jargonese, “We will be measuring the quantitative metric to see if we’ve entered the ballpark” of signing people up for Obamacare. Call it “Metric, Reloaded”, but I think I’ll just say “Adieu”.
8) “Undocumented“. As an American completely encumbered by Documents (Building code applications, tax forms, Proofs of Insurance, drivers licenses, birth certificates, Certificates of Inspection, Proof of Weights and Measures, School Enrollments, and on and on and on) , an “Undocumented” American is right up there with a “Feline Dog”. It is even more completely impossible to be part of an “undocumented” “community”–don’t you at least need a membership card to be in a “community”/. Thus, this apoplexy-inducing term is hereby banished. It’s been documented.
9) “Press Guidance” …as in “Josef Goebbels will be providing Press Guidance for German Industry”. Kind of like “Enslaved Liberty”.
10) “Frack“ Flippin‘ and Friggin‘ could also top the list, and probably ought to. But, “Fracking” has been purloined by the Totalitarian Left as a pejorative, and thus, it is rejected utterly. Instead, I will keep with the simple “Drillbabydrill”, and watch all the promoters of 18th-century living try to explain that, despite Barack Obama’s best efforts to choke off energy supplies, the price of natural gas is cratering.
…and that is just the beginning. The left is so good at inventing language, expropriating language, and hijacking language that the Nominations for Banishment might seem endless. But, feel free to add your own nominations to our RedState List…!
http://www.redstate.com/conservativecurmudgeon/2013/12/25/redstates-year-end-list-of-banished-words-and-phrases-from-the-queens-english-open-for-nominations/
