E-Nough Is E-Nough, Cliche Collectors Say

“Thinking outside the box,” “e-anything” and “millennium” are on a list of overused words and phrases deserving banishment from everyday English, a Midwestern university said today in its annual diatribe against tiresome cliches.

The banned words list, inaugurated in 1976 by a public relations expert hoping to attract attention to obscure Lake Superior State University, seeks to torpedo hackneyed phrases and misused words.

The school’s staff chose from among hundreds of submissions from around the world, and then quoted the indignant reasons cited for why the offending words should get the push.

Politicians and their speech writers may be at a loss without some favored cliches, including “thinking outside the box,” which many wished would die an unnatural death as a corny substitute for creative thinking.

Several critics complained that too many graduation speeches, advertisements and conversations are peppered with the increasingly irritating, if timely, “millennium.”

Kevin Chu of Cupertino, Calif., argued for the extinction of Y2K, the so-called “millennium bug” that may lead computers to misread the year 2000 as 1900.

The techno-world may never be the same without “e-commerce” and its hyphenated variations denoting business and just about anything else done on the Web. But that would be fine with Emma Sams of Sault Ste. Marie, who said: “E-nough is e-nough.”

Another word that caused weary heads to shake and fingers to wag was “issues,” of which Leonard Schakel of Lakeland, Minn., said: “If people could no longer say it, they would be forced to articulate just what it is that is bothering them.”

Popular slang phrases such as “24/7,” an abbreviation for open all the time, “no worries,” and “know what I’m sayin’?” repeated by people apparently nervous about what they are saying, were disdained by several contributors.

“If I hear any of my employees use [‘It’s all good’], they will be fired,” pledged Zachariah Love of Los Angeles.

Overused descriptives--”road rage” (maniacal motorists), “at-risk” (after all, who is not at risk of something?), “quality of life” (a practically meaningless catch phrase), “sea change” (Webster’s dictionary calls it an archaic term referring to change brought about by the sea itself), and “wake-up call” (is this a warning to those who may have been sleeping?)--captured the ire of cliche critics.

The sports world--a bastion of boring cliches--should initiate immediate bans on the phrases “he or she came to play” and “flat-out,” both hackneyed phrases denoting effort.

Australians asked for nouns masquerading as verbs to be banished. Among the offenders was “trialed,” referring to a legal case going to court, and describing an injured player as getting “stretchered off.”