Now more than ever, you need to know these 9 phrases to avoid like the plague in 2022 | The Grammarian

Before we left the halcyon, pre-insurrection days of 2020, I identified 13 horrible words and phrases the world needed to stop using: “Asking for a friend,” “Thank you for coming to my TED Talk,” “It is what it is,” etc. A year later, no one says any of those things anymore. Good work, team! Let’s do it again.

Presenting nine more words and phrases for which we’re denying entry to 2022.

“Post-pandemic.” We’re not post- anything, and it’s increasingly unlikely we ever will be. Feel free to reapply in 2023.

“Avoid it like the plague.” For two years, we’ve proven colossally bad at avoiding the plague, so the phrase is useless. You once could have used it ironically, but sadly, irony also died in 2021 — sometime around when Philadelphia Weekly, the onetime vaunted progressive alt-weekly that birthed the original Angry Grammarian column, held the world’s most abhorrent “Guess the murders, win a prize” contest. Someone tell Alanis.

“Now more than ever.” Just. Too. Many. Adverbs. Three of these four tired words are adverbs; than is the one lonely conjunction. Stephen King said: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” I’ll add: “And it’s greased with overused, underdeveloped drivel.”

“NFT.” Acronyms should aid understanding. The best ones bring concision without compromising comprehension. But even after 2021 saw hundreds of millions of dollars in NFTs — nonfungible tokens — sold, no one still has any idea what they are. Something about digital property and internet memes and blockchain? Maybe if we stop talking about them, they’ll go away.

“Understood the assignment.” Internet slang for “job well done,” but used to death in 2021, thanks in part to the most annoying song of the year. Rule of thumb: Once something goes viral on TikTok, add two weeks, and then consider it past its expiration date.

“Tell me ___ without telling me ___.” Just tell me.

“You’re on mute.” Zoom has hundreds of emoji reactions, but not one for the sentence that must be said at least once per video call? We have to do better than the “speak no evil” monkey. 🙊

“Woke.” It had a good run. For nearly a century, woke meant “awareness of racial or social discrimination and injustice,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and came from African American Vernacular English. White American English largely ignored the term because white Americans were largely unaware of racial or social discrimination or injustice. In 2021, however, “woke” anything became the favored bogeyman of the right. By applying it to pretty much anything they didn’t like, conservatives (and more than a few liberals) have whitewashed its connotation to something squishy and amorphous. Words change definitions all the time, but when one loses all meaning, it’s done. You’ve worked hard, woke. Get some rest.

“Cancel culture.” Have you ever wished you were wrong more often? Like in a July 2020 column, when I wrote, “I hope you like the phrase [cancel culture], because we’re about to hear a lot more of it over the coming months.” Alas, here we are: If last week’s nerdy Grammarian treatise on newspaper style guides — in which I explained The Inquirer’s decision to call celebrity doctor and U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz by his actual name — can be branded as “cancel culture” and suck up the oxygen for a whole news cycle, then the term is meaningless. So we’re … um … canceling it.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and digital ledgers to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.

Two little letters that could skew the Pa. Senate race

Biden’s ‘I’ll be darned’ packs a bigger punch than Trump’s F-bombs

Calling people ‘the unvaccinated’ could be a deadly shift in language