Hasta La Vista, 2015

So, I was having this problematic conversation with my fellow stakeholders of the gene pool about the price point of all the food gracing the holiday dinner table, and Donald Trump was in the background vaping his own fumes in his latest presser and breaking the Internet in the process,  and I was doing my pathetic best to avoid the awful physicality of my manspreading drunk cousin who only succeeded  in dribbling the secret sauce out of his flapping maw as he tried to walk back his insults by spewing inanities that he thought would give me life.

Phew. 

So, yes, fellow Sardonickists, it is possible to put all the Banished Words of 2015 into one nightmare sentence.

From the Word Police of Lake Superior State University comes the latest list of words (bolded above) that people are sick of saying, hearing, and reading.

Answering a question with the article "so" is just one of a dozen forms of wordplay that made it onto LSSU's 41st annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. The tradition created by the late W. T. Rabe, former public relations director at Lake Superior State University, is now in its fifth decade. Compilers hope this year's list will be so popular that it will break the Internet.
“Overused words and phrases are ‘problematic’ for thousands of Queen's English ‘stakeholders,’” said an LSSU spokesperson while ‘vaping’ an e-cigarette during a ‘presser.’  “Once something is banished, there's no ‘walking it back;’ that's our ‘secret sauce,' and there’s no ‘price point’ for that.”
Rabe and fellow LSSU faculty and staff came up with the first list of words and phrases that people love to hate at a New Year’s Eve party in 1975, publishing it on Jan. 1, 1976. Though he and his friends created the first list from their own pet peeves about language, Rabe said he knew from the volume of mail he received in the following weeks that the group would have no shortage of words and phrases from which to choose for 1977. Since then, the list has consisted entirely of nominations received from around the world throughout the year.

So the word that is most hated this year is So. Not in the sense of "OMG, I am so not liking Donald Trump," but rather, the way that politicians and other annoying people have of beginning the answer to every question with the word "So" as a more genteel replacement for "Um," "Er" or "Duh" -- in other words, So is a verbal trigger warning that informs you that you are about to be microaggressed.

Here is an example:

Reporter: Mr. President, is it true that you ordered the NSA to spy on American citizens?

Prez: So, as I have said many times before, the privacy of my friends is very important to me. But I welcome the opportunity to have a conversation about their civil rights with the stakeholders. It will really give me, and my last year in office, some legacy-burnishing life. What price point liberty, after all, you ridiculous little So and So.

So, with that, here is wishing all of you a very non-problematic 2016. Thank goodness there is no walking back 2015, unless it is to read all those horrendous Listicles breaking the Internet.

See you next year!