5 Words to eliminate from your vocabulary in 2016

Life is one beautiful trip

My work as a writer and editor causes me to read a sizable amount of content on a daily basis. Massive volume, really. News, social media, web content, curriculum, fiction. In the process of consuming such large amounts of information, there are words that surface frequently that are misused, overused, and generally misunderstood. It was quite a challenge limiting this list to just five items, which is why there are nine. Below is my suggestion, as the well-read, erudite, startlingly modest word generator that I am, for elimination from the 2016 English lexicon.

hack–Life hack. Cooking hack. Parenting hack is the absolute worst. Hack traditionally means to cut something up rather savagely. Eviscerate it. It is a hostile word. Replace it with the word “skill,” “shortcut,” or even “trick.” And for goodness sake, quite chopping up perfectly good cupcakes.

pivot–used in business. “We decided to pivot,” means we screwed up, had no idea what we were doing and realized we better try something else. “Strategic pivot,” means we really blew a lot of money before we discovered we had made a huge mistake.

curate–No. Pulling something off the metal hangar in your closet does not mean that you are “curating” your wardrobe. Curate is being used to describe republishing somebody else’s content and not creating any of your own, This is not a skill or talent, unless you work in a museum.

hbd–Oh my gosh, what an insult. If someone can’t take the nano-second required to type out Happy Birthday, then how sincere are they? Why have they even bothered? Not one of my friends has ever sent me an HBD, which out of context, sounds a lot like a disease.

Bitch-Quit calling each other Bitch. It is not a compliment. It is vulgar. It does not reflect feminine solidarity. If we don’t respect each other, how can we expect pay equity?

foodie– Oh yippee, you have enough disposable income to eat out a lot and buy organic produce that you probably don’t know how to cook. You use knowledge of food trends as a social status. You spend more time photographing your food than eating it.

hashtag–actually speaking the word in a sentence – “Oh, I hashtag love it. Hashtag incredible. Hashtag, the cutest. In a society in which we reduce entire sentences to a few letters, adding meaningless, unnecessary syllables lacks all logic.

bandwidth–“Maggie, I know your department’s bandwidth is really stretched right now, but do you think you can help us out with this?” The true meaning of bandwidth is transmission capacity. It does not refer to human beings. People. And by “stretching my bandwidth,” I know you really mean that you would like the already overworked, underpaid humans to work even more overtime to meet your unreasonable deadline.

American– What you really are trying to describe is a resident of the United States. It is self-centered, to constantly speak for Canada, Mexico, and Costa Rica. North America is made up of 23 countries. South America is comprised of 12 countries. Central America, 7 countries. Politicians are especially guilty of this. Donald Trump’s ubiquitous trucker hat is emblazoned with “Make America Great Again.” If you really wanted to make America great, you probably wouldn’t build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, thereby dividing two American countries.