Lake Superior University has published its Banished Words List for 2014.With some of them I happily agree: "____on steroids" is long past its best-before date, and suffixes like "-ageddon" and "-pocalypse" deserve to be blown out the airlock to follow "-gate."
With others, I beg to differ. "Selfie" is at least shorter than "self-portrait," and the "-ie" tells us we need not take it too seriously. "Hashtag" is convenient as a term for "specific news and opinion reported via Twitter." "Twittersphere" has the advantage of being instantly understandable to anyone who understands the term "blogosphere."
The expressions that still drive me crazy are now clearly too evil to die: "beg the question" for "raise the question," for example, and "going forward" for "in future" (both from 2001). And may the next journalist who uses the term "under the bus" (2008) be thrown under the next three buses.
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