Watch Your Language: Lists, Good and Bad

Everyone loves to tell other people what words not to use, even the president.

In this business, agency after public relations agency makes it an annual habit to show off their smarts by instructing each other on which words are meaningless, have no juice or are just obfuscatory. I’m guilty of it myself — in my prior life as a journalist, some colleagues and I maintained an extensive list of words and phrases that good writers should avoid inflicting on the public, with high-minded explanations of why these words were bad.

At the top of my list then was “allegedly,” an adverb designed to hide who was doing the alleging while giving a reporter or editor a false sense of security that they were not the ones making an accusation. It would have been both clearer and more responsible to have attributed the accusation to its source.

But now, as my co-workers at Momentum Communications Group are tired of hearing, the worst word in my world is “impactful,” a word so breathtakingly vague that it means practically nothing. It is flaccid iceberg lettuce ruining your sandwich. It’s the Muzak rendition of Motown — seems like it ought to have some punch, but it evaporates and leaves no trace. It makes no impact.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration promulgated rules that punished researchers and others for using words it didn’t like. For a brief moment, I felt uneasy about all the bad-word lists I’d shared and made over the years. But then I realized the lists that journalists and communications professionals make are designed to promote clarity and meaning. The purpose of the administration’s lists, however, was to make communication about some topics go away.

You remember that time. It’s when we worried that instead of talking about discrimination, we’d have to make reference to undefined “challenges.” Or to avoid speaking about social justice, we’d use its lesser cousin, “fair treatment.” Never mind the linguistic gymnastics to avoid words like gender or race. These lists of bad words squelched clear communication.

So let’s circle back — that thing you do when you leave home without your lunch or your left shoe — and push some lousy words and phrases toward extinction.

Lived experience. All experience by definition is lived. This is a social science term that can stay in academia.

Basic needs. If you truly need something to survive, it’s basic.

Leverage. We gain leverage by using a lever, so just say “use.”

Honored, thrilled. No you’re not.

Transformative. Unless this initiative or proposal literally changes something from one thing to another — like lead into gold, for example —  it’s not transformative. It might be a lot of other good things, so let’s use those words instead.

Ideate and iterate. The foul rhyming twins of pretension. In addition to being poor versions of robust words we already use, people often use them wrongly while trying to sound fancy.

Actionable. Who would have thought there could be a word even worse than “feasible?”

The key to making a point is to use sharp language, and you’re not going to do that by repeating the stale, limp language of consultancy that gets slobbered onto conference room tables every day or regurgitated from other people’s press releases by your favorite AI timesaver.

It takes time and skill to sharpen prose, just as it does to sharpen a knife. And in both cases, the magnificent tool you create is worth the effort.