You will know by now that I like words, even if this blog is the poor cousin of good writing. So it is always with interest when I espy articles about words, their usage, how they change and so forth. Every year Lake Superior State University publishes a list of words that it deems as being worthy of banishment and 2016 was no different. So here goes.....

Last year, especially during the US election season, we seemed to live in a post-truth world. This was particularly the case with Clinton's bete noire, Donald Trump, for whom facts seemed irrelevant and who lied often and then, bigly. The many guestimates about how the General Election would go, from a variety of pundits, proved not only to be wrong, but also demonstrated the echo chamber many Washington insiders inhabited. Even though Clinton was on fleek during her debates with Trump, the latter's skill-set was clearly underestimated. The takeaway from the debates was that Clinton won handily but also that Trump didn't lose by that much. Somewhere out there in blue-collar nation, another audience was taking note and laying plans for a surprise. No matter what the twittersphere was saying, Joe Six-pack was thinking differently and (spoiler alert) ready to hand the mantel on to the orange man. The Clinton team was royally t-boned. We are yet to feel the full blowback from this extraordinary result.

The words in italics, you probably guessed, were candidates for the 2016 list, but I borrowed a few from years just prior, to give the piece more flavour. The only word(s) I would quibble with are bete noire, a very useful and quite old borrowing which nicely sums up a thorn in one's side.

To finish, this quotation(after Plato) from one of the compilers of this list. "We'd like to advocate here(that) the unexamined word is not worth speaking." May it be so.