WORDS TO BANISH IN 2011
Some say certain trendy words have become over-used.  I'd have to agree:
"Viral" leads this year's list of "banished words" from a Michigan university seeking an antidote to over-used expressions.  The word -- often used to describe popular one-hit wonders on YouTube -- garnered numerous nominations for the annual list, released byLake Superior State University on Friday.
"This linguistic disease of a term must be quarantined," wrote Kuahmel Allah of Los Angeles wrote in nominating "viral" on the university's website.  The university says it receives more than 1,000 submissions each year on its website for the playful list, which a public relations official created in 1976 to draw more attention to the school.  "Viral" wasn't the only digital-age term in the cross-hairs of linguistic sticklers this year. "Fail" and "BFF" made the 2011 list, which also included a proposal to ban using Facebook and Google as verbs."


Now, here's more from Jodee Blanco, and her book PLEASE STOP LAUGHING AT ME:
"...I'm going to share with you a story about an underdog--someone who everyone made fun of, someone who never got invited to parties, and who was so lonely, she felt lost.  This girl had wild, wiry hair that never looked as if it was combed.  She wasn't like the other kids at school.  She would rather write poems and make up songs than hang out and talk about boys.  She ached to have friends, but wasn't interested in the same things as her peers.  They thought she was weird.  They disliked the way she dressed.  They didn't understand why she was different, and they chose not to try.  Rather than opening their hearts to this strange, beautiful bird, she was cast out from the flock.  She didn't fit in.  As the years passed and the rejection she endured in school became buried in a secret place in her memory, she discovered she had a gift for turning those songs she used to hear inside her head into music that reached people's souls.  Millions of people...That misfit who everyone picked on, who was the butt of every joke and the target of so much cruelty, was Janis Joplin.  You all know her music.  It helped define a generation.  Your children will listen to Janis Joplin, just as your parents did, and as I bet many of you do, too.  Janis Joplin died in her twenties from a drug overdose.  She was so full of pain and hurt that she tried to numb it with drugs.  Eventually, they killed her.  I'll always wonder:  if the kids in her school had tried to get to know her, and instead of ridiculing and shunning her for being different, had embraced her for being special, would she still be alive today?  We'll never know.  But one thing we do know for sure.  There are people just like Janis Joplin among us now."


So true!