Writers like to add spice to their texts by sprinkling them with metaphors, analogies, and similes; well-conceived, they can add color and sometimes make a concept more-easily grasped. (Churchill’s Iron Curtain and Eisenhower’s military/industrial complex are two brilliant and enduring illustrations.) They can however be overused and become cliches.
So it is that Lake Superior State University has created an annual “Banished Word List” in which it looks back over a year and designates those words and phases which have become cliches through that year. As a public service we present a sampling of the past five years’ “winners”:
2005: blue states/red states, flip-flop, battleground state, pockets of resistence, improvised explosive device (bomb?), enemy combatant (is a combatant ever friendly?), carbs, blog, sale event.
2004: metrosexual (preening urban male), x-(fill in the rest), companion animals (pets?), bling and bling-bling, smoking gun, sanitary landfill (try “dump”).
2003: material breach (are they ever immaterial?), untimely death (when is it timely?), black ice, extreme (choose your noun!), branding, reverse discrimination.
2002: surgical strike, faith-based, friggin, nine-eleven, brainstorming, synergy, ramp up, edgy, infomercial, functionality, reality TV, totally unique, sworn affidavit, foreseeable future.
2001: speaks to, fuzzy math, negative growth, leverage, factoid, dude, final destination.
— Ken Butera