The “Yuck List”

I blame the lawyers and the politicians for our failure to communicate

Over 20+ years, my high school students and I compiled the “Yuck List”, designed to help kids learn to avoid the all-too-common Foot-in-Mouth Disease. A year-end assessment required the senior Journalism kids to compose an essay using as many of these nasty words/phrases/names as possible. John Belushi’s Bluto from “Animal House” always presided over the proceedings. Photo: Author’s archives

I blame the lawyers — and by extension, the politicians. They’re always taking the “opportunity” to turn words into convoluted versions of themselves; “hopefully”, they believe, their verbiage will be “impactful”. Often, sadly, their “affect” has less of an “effect” than they believe.

When I worked in politics, one of my supervisors was the master of the pompous phrase. Her favorite was “in terms of”. Never understood that. Still don’t.

If you’ve ever worked for a lawyer, or a politician — most of whom are lawyers — you’d get my drift. Not to disparage all of you, but a more pompous but yet strangely needy chattering class has never existed in this country. As a journalist and as a scribe in the political realm, I spent so many hours translating “opportunity” to “chance” and erasing “hopefully” from text that I should write a book about it. Instead, I thought I’d take this opportunity to write an essay instead. PS: “Hopefully” — at least the way it’s usually used — is not really a word. The way these folks mean it, anyway. Same goes for “literally”, which strangely never made the “Yuck List”.

In the end, the apparent need of these self-important blowhards to sound important “definitely” has turned American English into…