Sault Sainte Marie,
Sunday
COMPUTER-SPEAK such as cyberspace and online topped the annual New Year's list of over-used cliches that deserve to be unplugged, an American university said today.
``Cyber-ANYTHING sets my teeth on edge,'' wrote contributor Michelle Mooney in her nomination to the banned-word list of Lake Superior State University.
Its public relations department's 20th annual list selected online as a representative of offensive jargon worthy of being discarded. ``Where is the `line' that everyone is on?'' asked nominator Michelle Batterbee. ``It sounds like some place a fish should be.''
The O J Simpson murder trial spawned the disingenuous the race card, and several contributors merely sought relief from those ubiquitous initials, OJ.
Several examples of celebrity-speak also failed the test for concise speech, such as promotions of alternative music groups from Nirvana to Kiss who rocked unplugged.
Overworked euphemisms such as actor Sylvester Stallone's exclamation ``Absolutely!'', instead of a simple ``yes'', irked other contributors.
Republican leader Newt Gingrich was singled out for using the word ``frankly'' 12 times in one speech, nearly as often as he intoned ``liberal'', which was on the university's list of banned words last year.
News reports about the civil war in the former Yugoslavia produced the innocuous euphemism ethnic cleansing for genocide, and referred to foreign troops with the oxymoron peacekeeping force.
The university aimed jabs at a host of other words and phrases it found objectionable, including: revisit, touch base, done deal, on the same page, and, finally, closure.-Reuter.
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