Word watchers

The way we use the language to communicate messages is one of my keenest interests, especially how the media use and abuse words.

So I really like this little story the Associated Press picked up about some studious word watchers.

If the media’s habit of combining celebrity names didn’t cause word watchers enough heartburn in 2006, the past year had plenty of other words and phrases that language purists wish had “gone missing.”

Lake Superior State University on Sunday released its annual “List of Words and Phrases Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.”

They drew in over 4,500 nominations for the list over the school’s website, representing people’s “pet peeves from everyday speech as well as from the news, fields of education, technology, advertising, politics and more.”

Here’s the new “list of banished words.”

The AP pointed out a phrase or two the news folks have overused themselves, without realizing it, no doubt.

It wasn’t hard to find the phrase “gone/went missing” in 2006. “It makes ‘missing’ sound like a place you can visit, such as the Poconos. Is the person missing, or not?” asked Robin Dennis of Texas.

And then there were those catchy words that make it into the language and just become de facto dictionary terms.

The university’s word watchers had no use for “truthiness,” the word popularized by Comedy Central satirist Stephen Colbert. It was selected as the word that best summed up 2006 in an online survey by dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster.

How does “truthiness” best sum up 2006? I can’t even imagine.

How about starting off now with a word to define 2007? I nominate “clarity.”