So, every new year brings a new round of word-shaming in the form of the banished words list. The list is put out by the PR department of a minor midwestern university, and it’s widely reported in the media. You can google the list, if you haven’t already, but don’t waste your time: banning words doesn’t improve language.
Leading off the annual banished words list is sentence-initial so (see the first paragraph for an example of this increasingly-common feature of English conversation) followed by conversation, problematic, stakeholder, and a few others you may or may not like yourself. Other people might prefer to banish microaggression, safe space, schlong, emoji, I can’t even, and it is what it is. But banning these words won’t make them go away. Year after year, people single out like for the silent treatment, but it’s, like, still here.
There are always words or expressions that get overused, words we love to hate, words we resolve to shun, words we shame others for using. Disliking other people’s words has become a predictable, if pointless, feature of our linguistic landscape.
The rationale for banning overused words is that overuse saps meaning—or to speak technically, information content is inversely proportional to frequency of occurrence. But loss of meaning’s not always a bad thing. Take greetings, for example. Hi, how are you? is a common greeting, but it’s seldom a request for a health status update. Responding to, “Hi, how are you?” with your list of physical and emotional complaints seems impolite, even when you’re talking to a doctor. So, like, hello?—despite the minimal information they carry, no one wants to ban greetings.
So, we can’t do without swear words, either. Like greetings, they’re common and don’t add a lot of information to the conversation. The interjections damn, fuck, and shit are not literal. Instead, they convey a sense of negative emotion, or even positive emotion. And despite their lack of meaning (technically, their low semantic load), we can’t do without swear words, so that even in contexts where swearing is taboo, we euphemize them into thinly-disguised darn, frig, and sugar.
So, some overused words are clearly important for maintaining efficient everyday discourse. Think of “like” on Facebook, which doesn’t mean “I like your status update,” it means, like, “Yeah, I saw you posted something. Maybe I read it. Maybe not.” But try banishing like from Facebook and see how far that gets you.
So, as for the overused words that we don’t like, or the ones that the PR department of a midwestern university seeking its fifteen minutes of fame doesn’t like, banning them just doesn’t work. Just as banning swearing—legally or through moral suasion—hasn’t reduced swearing, banning sentence-initial so won’t result in fewer sentences beginning with so. For one thing, people don’t like to be told their words are wrong. For another, many of the words on the banished word list aren’t wrong, many aren’t fads, many aren’t even overused (the data on frequency of occurrence of these candidates for banishment is so missing).
There’s hope for word banishers, but just a little. Sometimes overused words do die out: people tire of fads, which is why they’re called fads, not permanent cultural features. But, like fashion trends, as one fad word dies out, another one takes its place. Groovy had its fifteen minutes of fame. You don’t hear it much anymore, except perhaps ironically. On the other hand, there’s cool, a common slangy adjective born in the late 1800s, that just, like, became a permanent feature of English. I mean, how cool is that?
So, one last thing: people who make lists of words to banish actually use the words they hate when no one’s looking, a sure sign that resistance is futile.
Facebook has changed the meaning of friend and like. What are you going to do about it?
