I fear that by the end of this blog, people are going to be condemning me as a curmudgeon with no sense of humour. Ah well.

Lake Superior State University has been receiving global coverage for its annual list of words which should be banished, a list which it has been issuing for close on four decades. It contains a dozen words which it says should immediately be sent packing from the English language.

Now on Wordability, I have certainly commented that I dislike certain new words and phrases, and hoped that they don’t catch on. But once they do cement their place in the language, well that’s just linguistic life. And just because you don’t like them, there is nothing you can do about it. Thankfully, English is not a language where membership is decided by fusty academics behind closed doors, and I find myself slightly aggravated by the idea of banishing words, even though it is clearly tongue in cheek. I assume, anyway.

Fiscal Cliff tops the new list. But it is typical of all of the words on the list. It came into being because it needed to, because it fulfilled a linguistic gap that was demanding to be filled, so to banish it is to banish the concept itself or to ignore the need to find a way of talking about it. Spoiler Alert is an equally useful linguistic shorthand, YOLO has become a vital tool of social communication, and Trending is the perfect descriptor of what is happening on social networks, despite my wife telling me it is not a word whenever I use it.

Frankly, all these words need to exist. Do some of them offend my ears? Yes. Should we therefore get rid of them, just because they irritate us? Of course not. And I do find it slightly rich of Lake Superior University to run its results on the same page as its slogan, ‘Redefining The Classroom’, which is a phrase which sounds much worthier of banishment than any of those I have previously mentioned.

One final note – I would imagine that the American Dialect Society believes these words should not be banished either, as many of them made it to the shortlist for its word of 2012. But in the end Fiscal Cliff and Yolo, to name but two, lost out to hashtag.

I’m slightly surprised by the result – for me, hashtag has been well established for some time and was already entrenched before last year. But that’s just my view. What is clear is that it is a modern word which is necessary. So expect to see it on a list of words which should be banished any moment now.