BANISHED WORDS 2023
for Misuse, Overuse, and Uselessness
Lake Superior State University
Sault Ste. Marie, MI — Stop resorting to imprecise, trite, and meaningless words and terms of seeming convenience! You’re taking the lazy way out and only confusing matters by over-relying on inexact, stale, and inane communication!
Language monitors across the country and around the world decried the decrepitude and futility of basic methods to impart information in their mock-serious entries for Lake Superior State University’s annual tongue-in-cheek Banished Words List. LSSU announces the results of the yearly compendium on Dec. 31 to start the New Year on the right foot, er, tongue.
The vast majority of the 1,500-plus nominations of words and terms for banishment for misuse, overuse, and uselessness for 2023 reveled and wallowed in the erosion of fundamental expression.
Ranked No. 1 as the best of the worst: GOAT, acronym for Greatest of All Time. The many nominators didn’t have to be physicists or grammarians to determine the literal impossibility and technical vagueness of this wannabe superlative. Yet it’s bestowed on everyone from Olympic gold medalists to Jeopardy! champions, as one muckraker playfully deplored. Meanwhile, other naysayers remarked on social media posts that brandish a photo of, for instance, multiple cricket players or soccer stars with a caption about several GOATs in one frame.
“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,” said Peter Szatmary, executive director of marketing and communications at Lake State.
Here are the 10 words and terms that have been banished for 2023:
- GOAT
- Inflection point
- Quiet quitting
- Gaslighting
- Moving forward
- Amazing
- Does that make sense?
- Irregardless
- Absolutely
- It is what it is
My nomination would be blessed: . What would be yours?
Cathexis
Coined by Freud, the word “cathexis” comes from the psychodynamic tradition in psychology. A cathexis is an unhealthy concentration of mental energy on a person, idea or object. The word “fixation” is a related concept, as we become “fixated,” to an unhealthy degree, where there is a concentration of mental energy and investment. Along with “fixation,” “obsession” is another word that points to a cathexis.
You can think of a cathexis as a “hot spot” in the psyche, a “gravity well” that creates a mental orbit, even a kind of “black hole” that sucks up available energy. And that’s a key notion in psychodynamic thinking, how our mental energy is a finite resource. Our various cathexes, fixations and obsessions hurt us because they suck up mental energy, leaving us less energy to allocate, devote and invest in other areas of our lives. Like the pull of a large gravitational mass in space, a strong cathexis warps and distorts the psyche causing it to become twisted and imbalanced.
Psychic energy is a precious and limited resource, and every bit of energy sucked up by the cathexis [of politics] is energy that could be devoted to your family, your friendships, your church, your creativity, your spiritual formation, and your works of mercy in the local community.
Richard Beck
CHATgpt
Encouraging news—A college student created an app that can tell whether CHATgpt AI wrote an essay. Ironically it is AI that counters the threat of Chatgpt.
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/09/1147549845/gptzero-ai-chatgpt-edward-tian-plagiarism
Prophets
The prophets’ vocation is to cry out—to God, to the air, to any open heart; they cry out on behalf of God and on behalf of the poor because no one is listening except God. They cry out for those no one heeds, except maybe in passing in lip service.…
The prophets often see us as nearsighted, meaning we can only see what is immediately under our noses, connected to our own lives. We have lost sight of the vision of hope, of the future that God intends, while we have been concentrating with total self-absorption on our own immediate desires. We are like drivers lost in a fog of our own obsessions, unable to see the road clearly. And so we need the prophets, the far-seeing ones, the dreamers in broad daylight, the long-distance high beams that show us glimpses of where we are going and what the outcome of our choices and lifestyles will be. One way to define a prophet is a person who sees so clearly what is happening in the present moment that he or she can tell us what is going to happen if we don’t change immediately and radically.
Megan McKenna
Transformation
We can never engineer or guide our own transformation or conversion. If we try, it will be a self-centered and well-controlled version of conversion, with most of our preferences and addictions still fully in place, but now well-disguised. Any attempts at self-conversion would be like an active alcoholic trying to determine their own rules for sobriety. God has to radically change the central reference point of our lives. We do not even know where to look for another reference point because, up to now, it has all been about “me”! Too much “me” can never find “you”—or anything beyond itself.
Breathing Under Water – Richard Rohr
Academic Freedom
… if academic freedom really only means as much freedom as your most sensitive students can stand, an irresponsible position that puts the university, the classroom, and the careers of scholars in the hands of students who are inexperienced in the subject matter, new to academic life, and, often, still in the throes of adolescence.
Criticizing darkness
Nearly a generation ago, the social theorist Christopher Lasch argued that acknowledgment of the darkness is precisely what is missing.
“Having no awareness of evil, the once-born type of religious experience cannot stand up to adversity,” Lasch wrote. “It offers sustenance only so long as it does not encounter ‘poisonous humiliations.’”
In other words, as Jesus shows us in John 9, the problem lies not with the blind person crying out for sight but with those who won’t acknowledge their blindness: “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains” (v. 41).
For those who really pay attention—to the world, to the church, and to themselves—the portrayal of only the “good things” doesn’t do much to reassure or build trust. People for whom religion is just a vehicle for consolation and flourishing might be totally oblivious to this, but their kind of religion offers nothing for those who wonder whether anyone can see what’s killing them.
A word that doesn’t speak to that isn’t proclamation but propaganda. Propaganda might work for public relations, but it doesn’t come with the authority to drive out the darkness.
Yes, these are cynical times. The way institutions have misused power can make some people wonder whether every institution is that way. This cynicism isn’t accurate, but it’s also not crazy, given what we’ve seen.
Arguments about the facts of institutions and persons are not only legitimate but necessary. Making the case that an accused murderer wasn’t at the scene of the crime is different from saying, “Talking about murder here hurts tourism, so if you talk about it, you are being disloyal to our city.”
Russell Moore
Know what you’re talking about
…is very difficult to have serious conversations about serious things if we don’t have accurate labels for the things we’re talking about. As George Orwell observed, language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
Saint
A saint is not so much a man who realizes that he possesses virtues and sanctity as one who is overwhelmed by the sanctity of God. God is holiness. And therefore things are holy in proportion as they share Who He is. All creatures are holy in so far as they share in His being, but we are called to be holy in a far superior way—by somehow sharing His transcendence and rising above the level of everything that is not God.
Thomas Merton
VIEW from the lanai
Our nation continues to be embroiled in societal conflict; an un-civil war that threatens our future as a democracy. Unlike The culture war, initiated by the Christian right in 1970’s against secularism, atheism and moral decline; today’s war is a bewildering paradox in which the opposing camps are waging War on Reality. Each, believing they are championing the building of a just society, fabricate their own reality; a moral compromise Rod Dreher correctly characterizes as suicidal.
A lie is an attempt to reject reality as it is and to put something else in its place. A lie seeks to murder the truth.
Fr StephenFreeman
STILL ON THE JOURNEY