Okay, I admit it. There are more important things to obsess about, but I can be petty.
Back in November, I used this space to take to task the lamentable, yet burgeoning practice of using "so" as the first word of response to any question asked by any English-speaking interviewer anywhere, at any time. "So," has replaced "Uh," and the slightly deeper "Well," as a device to give the question-answerer an extra instant of time in which to attempt to frame an intelligent-sounding answer.
For instance, if Chicken Little had been interviewed by a National Public Radio reporter about his immediate thoughts upon realizing the sky was falling, he would have replied with something like, "So, grubs were in season and I was pecking my way across the coop yard when I heard this strange, sort of whistling sound and kind of reluctantly looked up to see a big chunk of sky heading my way."
As it turns out, great minds think alike.
Use of "so" as the first word in response to a question topped the chart in Lake Superior State University's 41st Annual List of Words to be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.
Each year, the public relations staff at the Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, college sorts through tens of thousands of words nominated for banishment from across the English-speaking world, and winnows the list of words to be exiled down to a dozen or so prime offenders. The work was begun in 1977 by the college's public relations staff, who also came up with the idea of holding a Burning Snowman festival to celebrate the arrival of spring and a Unicorn Hunters' Club, complete with official licenses and regulations sheets, to keep imaginations occupied during the cold Michigan winters.
The 2016 list marked "so's" second appearance on LSSU's do not resuscitate list, having been cited first back in 1999, when nominators over-used the word differently, as in "I am SO down with this list!"
Also making the 2016 list was "conversation," as in on-line publications and talk show hosts inviting us to "join the conversation," which usually turns out to be more of a scream-fest, according to the Banished Words List compilers. "Over the past five years or so, this word has been increasingly used by talking heads on radio, television and in political circles to describe every form of verbal communication known to mankind," they lamented.
Also getting stuck in the judges' craws this year was the word "presser," a shortened form of "press release" or "press conference," that, happily, doesn't seem to be used much around here, where the word is more likely to be associated with a job title in a dry cleaning shop. It takes a berth in the prose dumpster next to the phrase "walk it back," a longer and clumsier way to say "retract," and "stakeholder," which the judges describe as "a word that has expanded from describing someone who may actually have a stake in a situation or problem that is now being over-used in business to describe customers and others." Whenever I hear the word, a more pleasant image comes to mind: a person holding a platter of food about to be grilled at a non-vegan cookout.
Finally, I can appreciate the LSSU judges' call to do away with the hyperbolic phrase "break the Internet," used to drum up enthusiasm for saucy social media photo and video postings by suggesting that they will cause a stir powerful enough to make the "series of tubes" described by former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens short out and explode.
After all, if the Internet gets broken by featuring some celebrity's embarrassing actions or exposed body parts, I won't be able to see what the LSSU panel comes up with next year, and I can't ask you stakeholders to join the conversation as I pilfer items from the 2017 list.