No More Gaslighting the GOAT: 'Banished Words' of 2023 Revealed by a US University

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Goat  - Sputnik International, 1920, 03.01.2023
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Topped with the acronym GOAT, the list of "banished words" also included such gems as "irregardless," "quiet quitting" and "inflection point."
Hours before the end of 2022, the Lake Superior State University (LSSU) in Michigan released their annual “banished words list": a collection of “imprecise, trite, and meaningless words and terms of seeming convenience” that educators advise people to refrain from using in the New Year.
Nominations for the ten-word list were submitted to the university by people living both in the United States and abroad, including residents of countries such as Australia, Portugal, China and Namibia.
The acronym for Greatest of All Time, GOAT, tops last year's list, with one objector complaining that it is “applied to everyone and everything from athletes to chicken wings” nowadays.
The list also included words and terms such as “inflection point,” “quiet quitting,” “gaslighting,” “moving forward,” “amazing,” “does that make sense?” “irregardless,” “absolutely” and “it is what it is.”
 Oxford English Dictionary - Sputnik International, 1920, 05.12.2022
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“Words and terms matter. Or at least they should. Especially those that stem from the casual or causal. That’s what nominators near and far noticed, and our contest judges from the LSSU School of Arts and Letters agreed,” Peter Szatmary, executive director of marketing and communications at Lake State, said as quoted in a press release by the university.
“They veritably bleated their disapproval about the attempted nonpareil of GOAT because the supposed designation becomes an actual misnomer. The singularity of ‘greatest of all time’ cannot happen, no way, no how. And instead of being selectively administered, it’s readily conferred. Remember Groucho Marx’s line about not wanting to join a club that would accept him as a member?” he added.
Szatmary also described the rest of the words featured on the list as falling “somewhere on the spectrum between specious and tired” and “empty as balderdash or diluted through oversaturation.”
The university has been compiling its Banished Words List since 1976, eventually copyrighting the concept in a bid 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,” the press release clarified.
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