Lake Superior State University has chosen the ten words it found were most "misused, overused, and useless" in 2022 and forbidden people from using them at all for the next 12 months.
This isn't anything to do with modern cancel culture or curbing freedom of speech on campus, Lake Superior State University has been compiling its list of banned words for the entire incoming year since 1976.
Over the decades, more than 1,000 everyday terms have made it on to the roll of shame - some more than once. And this year, sees GOAT (the acronym for Greatest Of All Time), top the poll. Also included were:
Inflection point
Gaslighting
Quiet quitting
Moving forward
Amazing
Absolutely
Does that make sense?
Irregardless
It is what it is
For its 2023 list, Lake Superior State University judges reviewed more than 1,500 submissions before coming up with their top ten.
A university spokesperson said, of the number one nominee, GOAT: "The many nominators didn't have to be physicists or grammarians to determine the literal impossibility and technical vagueness of this wannabe superlative."
Words and terms banned in 2022 included "no worries", "you're on mute," and "wait, what?"
Others over the years have included "vis-a-vis", "information superhighway", "I'm like," and, for a nation some might say not as 'skilled' at football punditry as the UK, bizarrely also outlawed was "giving 110 percent."
The university has even copyrighted the concept of its Banished Words List to "uphold, protect, and support excellence in language by encouraging avoidance of words and terms that are overworked, redundant, oxymoronic, clichéd, illogical, nonsensical-and otherwise ineffective, baffling, or irritating". Nuff said.