Lake Superior State University in Michigan has continued its decades-long tradition of banishing a list of popular words from the previous year, and forbidding students to use them in 2024.
OGN featured last year's banished words, and this year 10 new words get the chop, as usual, because they were the most "misused, overused, and useless" in 2023 and students are now being forbidden from using them at all for the next 12 months.
To determine the words to be cut, nominations pour in. For the newest list, LSSU says it received more than 2,000 suggestions from 20 different countries. That's at least 500 more submissions than the previous year.
Last year, ‘GOAT’ topped the list. Before that, it was ‘Wait, what?’ To no real surprise, ‘COVID-19’ was banished in 2021. Kicking off 2020, ‘jelly’ was the top banished word - not the fruit spread, but the abbreviation of ‘jealous.’
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."
Landing at the top of the list this year is ‘hack,’ which has become common-place to describe easy money-making methods (like side hustles, another word on the list this year), ways to order off ‘secret’ fast food menus, and, unfortunately, scammers.
Here is the Michigan university's full list of banished words for 2024. If you have to look up what any of them mean, you likely haven’t been using them too much.
Hack
Impact
At the end of the day
Rizz
Slay
Iconic
Cringe-worthy
Obsessed
Side hustle
Wait for it
Not everyone hates these words, though. Oxford University Press declared ‘rizz’ as its word of the year for 2023.
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