As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.” The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United States and Canada. The 2012 list of unfriended words includes the following: amazing (the most nominated), baby bump (a close second), shared sacrifice, occupy, blowback, man cave, the new normal, pet parent, win the future, trickeration, ginormous, and thank you in advance.
Alas, language changes whether we want it to or not. They have to: things change, we change, and language changes so we can talk about it all. As University of Illinois linguist Denis Baron says, “Like all living languages, English is always changing: new words are coined and old ones are modified or discarded, as we scramble to keep up with the human imagination and an ever-changing world.” And that means words broaden and narrow their meanings, or we metaphorically extend words ready at hand. “Holy Day” became “holiday;” “cool” once referred to a specific style of jazz rather than a general expression of approval. “Meat” once indicated any kind of food, “deer” any kind of animal, “vulgar” once meant ordinary, “girl” any young person. We “surf” the Internet, likely using a “mouse” to do so and hoping to experience no “bugs” or “viruses” or “worms.” Language is irrepressibly mutable, gloriously so, I think. The only immutable languages are dead languages.
[…] As the life of any language reveals, language conservatism is a position cannot be long occupied, is thankless in advance, and will not win the future. Language change is the old normal. The spoken word always has and always will amble blithely away from its written tradition, with scarcely a backward glance.