Lake Superior State University in the US publishes a list of ‘banished words’– terms that have been so misused or overused that they should be put out to pasture and dropped from our vocabularies (at least for a while). They’ve been doing this since 1976. It started out as a bit of fun for their serious linguists, but over the years it has morphed into a valuable guide tracking the ways in which our language is being abused.