Dec 14, 2011 Samantha McGarry
Last year’s post about 10 words to retire in 2011 spurred so much debate among us PR folks that we felt compelled to update it with a throng of words that we firmly believe need a permanent “timeout” or a creative refresh in 2012.
Fellow communicators – we are wordsmiths at our core, so consider this a call to arms!
Let’s take some lessons and inspiration from the literary world to come up with better and more descriptive words. Unexpected, creative and imaginative words – and let’s not forget muscular verbs – will help our press releases, pitches, tweets and other content cut through the morass of bland, jargon-filled marketing content. Our prose needs to get the attention it – and our clients – deserve. After all, we want to write content that people will read and share.
Some of this year’s candidate words are still too corporate and vacuous. Many are overused, abused and lack substance, and some were hip in 2011 but have run their course. Without further ado, here’s our list.
- Premier
- Leverage
- Excited/thrilled/delighted (should be stricken from all press release quotes – please)
- Web 2.0
- End-user
- Productize
- Holistic
- Integrated
- Digerati
- Just sayin’
- LOL, FML, OMG, Gr8
- Viral
- Fail
- Winning
Since originally publishing this post, several of you in the fields of editing, PR, marketing and TV journalism have nominated the words you are fed up with via Twitter (#wordsweshouldretire) and Facebook. Thanks for your contributions and keep them coming! Here are the new additions which include some old favorites and some newbies:
- Transparency
- Cloud-based
- Next-generation
- Game-changing
- Incentivize/monetize/strategize
- Occupy
- Gamification
- Flat-out
- Surreal
- Deja vu all over again
- Using.periods.to.separate.all.your.words.in.a.sentence.
- [insert noun] junkie
- Austerity
- Whatever
- Swag
Apparently, we are not the only people concerned with proper writing. The editors at The Boston Globe take their words seriously too. Journalists there have been encouraged to avoid using “announce,” “ongoing” and “impact” as verbs and “seeing” as in “the company is seeing soaring profits.” (Hint: It’s passive construction; better to say “company profits are soaring.”)
PR professionals and reporters are not alone in this quest for improving our semantic vaults. Here are some links to other words you might want to think twice about using, starting today. And be sure to let us know of any other words that you think deserve retirement in 2012.
- 10 buzzwords that need to vanish in 2012
- A New Words Resolution
- Lake Superior State University 2011 List of Banished Words
- Top 9 Most Overused Words
- The 10 Most Overused LinkedIn Profile Buzzwords of 2011
- Poll: The Most Annoying Word of 2011 is ...
