Overuse injury

Inside our long impulse to banish trendy words

January 02, 2011|The word, Jan Freeman

For pop-language watchers, January marks the end of the words-of-the-year ritual that has so far given us refudiate (New Oxford American Dictionary), austerity (Merriam-Webster), and spillcam (Global Language Monitor). On Friday, members of the American Dialect Society will meet to consider the likes of vuvuzela, halfalogue, and gleek for spots on its 2010 list.

Not all the annual wordfests, however, are celebratory. Since 1976, Lake Superior State University in Michigan has been issuing a list of words and phrases to be banished “for mis-use, over-use, and general uselessness.” And though it’s hardly shocking to find that a list of peeves predates the more dispassionate collections of recent years, it made me wonder: How did word-hating become a game all Americans could play?

It all began, apparently, in the second half of the 19th century, when newspapers first compiled lists of taboo words for their own use. Journalists, of course, do have to follow house style and to avoid words their bosses deem “overworked.” It’s not clear that the average citizen has to be quite so vigilant, but usage advice was a booming genre at the time. Editors, teachers, and opinionators of all stripes found an audience eager to hear their rules and prejudices.

And once the notion of “overworked” words had spread, it was a club any writer could wield. Between 1890 and 1920, the Google News archive reveals, words accused of overexposure included crank, very, negligible, obsession, detachment, uplift, efficiency, classy, service, and the headline standbys rap, assail, attack, and flay.

In the 1920s, absolutely, dynamic, modern, and propaganda all made someone’s “overworked” list. In the ’30s, sophisticated, contact (the verb), definitely, and gargantuan got the label. In the ’40s, memorable, divine, critical, and priority were worn out; in the ’50s came fabulous, cozy, thrill, and moderation. And in the ’60s, glamour, breakthrough, and significance were called overexposed.

Some of these words no doubt were fads in the writer’s own field — sports, fashion, politics, diplomacy. But not necessarily; if you wanted to denounce obsession as overused a century ago, or critical in the ’40s, who could contradict you? There was no online corpus to check; if the reader hadn’t noticed, he could only conclude that he wasn’t as observant as the writer.