Listing to the right

There was a time when someone would miss a two-foot putt or a three-point field goal, and they would be labelled "the goat" - the object of those two reactions that have been joined at the hip forever - scorn, and derision.

Then all of a sudden, someone decided that "the goat" should be just the opposite - the object of another long-time couple, veneration, and idolization. People decided that "goat" now stood for "greatest of all time" and slapped that tag on Tom Brady, who is the greatest something of all time, not necessarily the greatest quarterback.

And then Meryl Streep became the goat (of actors) and so did Malala Yousafzai and Simone Biles and Justin Tucker, and, of course, Muhammad Ali put that initialized appellation on himself years ago - and deserved to.

So we say "thanks" to the good people on the faculty of Lake Superior State University in Michigan, a school that publishes an annual list of words we can live without due to "misuse, overuse, and uselessness."

Rodney S. Hanley, the university's president, remarked, "Our nominators insisted, and our Arts and Letters faculty judges concurred, that to decree the Banished Words List 2023 as the GOAT is tantamount to gaslighting. Does that make sense?"  

"Irregardless, moving forward, it is what it is: an absolutely amazing inflection point of purposeless and ineptitude that overtakes so many mouths and fingers," Hanley pointed out, racking up a pretty high score for using the words his faculty abjures and wants used less, if at all.

So here are the ten terms and phrases you shan't hear from me for a long while:

• Goat
• Inflection point  - this is actually a grammar term that was co-opted by the people who use "price point" to mean "price."
• Quiet quitting - we used to call it not doing anything until they fire you
• Gaslighting - dimming the lights and making you wonder if you're getting dim too
• Moving forward - as opposed to just "moving"
• Amazing - just because someone bought a red shirt, is that really amazing?
• Does that make sense?  - this is a sentence-ender meaning "Are you smart enough to understand my brillliant declamation?"
• Irregardless - people think this is an intensified version of "regardless."
• Absolutely - absolutely overused.
• It is what it is - this is the way to seem profound, much as a beginning mathematician might inform everyone at the dinner table that "any number multiplied by one keeps its identity." As a ham sandwich is a ham sandwich.

And of course, I would also suggest a moratorium on the use of "joined at the hip."