As we finish collecting and reviewing all the new words from 2017 in preparation for our Word of the Year, it’s important to take a moment to reflect also on the words that we didn’t like so much. We’ve talked about words we hate before, and really, some of these are likely still true today. Literally continues to infuriate, and corporate babble like talk offline or deep dive will likely always irk people.
But some others that have come into disrepute have also caught our attention throughout the year.
We have talked about versing before, and its rise through playgrounds to become more widely used. This word is paralleled by the rise of school incursions, meaning excursions taking place on school grounds. A new usage that triggers some unnecessary alarm bells.
It’s interesting to see who dislikes our 2014 Word of the Year, mansplain, often it comes from individuals who claim there should also be a ‘womansplain’ to accompany this word. Do you know anyone who doesn’t appreciate this word?
It was our Word of the Year last year, and is the Collins Dictionary Word of the Year this year. Fake news continues to take over popular media both in usage and presence. And while the word itself is not to be hated, its usage as an accusation against faithful media coverage in an attempt to discredit the truth is another matter. Perhaps the biggest culprit of this is the Donald Trump, but for him, it’s his entire lexicon that drives some people to despair.
Public obsession and Trump’s overuse of social media means we often spend days decoding typos and meaning where perhaps there is none. Case in point is the kerfuffle over covfefe, which we spoke about earlier this year. A nonsense word, it exploded out of one of Trump’s tweets to be intensely overanalysed before fading to relative obscurity – a footnote to his language.
What words do you hate? We’d love to know.
