Six words and phrases to avoid in 2023

We don’t yet know what words and phrases will be born in 2023. But we’re certain which ones should be left in the embarrassing morass of 2022.

For the last couple of years, I’ve compiled lists of words (woke, post-pandemic) and phrases (it is what it is, now more than ever, etc.) to kill off as the calendar turns — and it’s been 100% successful, they’ve completely disappeared, yay us! Keep up the good work and stop using the following atrocities too.

We come to bury these words, not to praise them.

Slay. A few years ago, Beyoncé said slay, so we slayed.

Unfortunately, she didn’t say when to stop. 2022 Google lookups of slay were higher than ever.

Now, through grievous overuse, the word has lost all meaning. Literally, all: One of the most popular definitions of slay on Urban Dictionary — a crowdsourced slang reference guide that’s surprisingly effective at capturing our lexicon in the moment — is a circularly referential nightmare: “slay: literally just slay. it can can [sic] be whatever u want it to be xx.” Urban Dictionary’s nonsense (but accurate) usage example reads, in its entirety: “omg slay.”

Omg stop. Please.

Living rent-free in my head. Do you typically charge for internal thoughts? I was unaware this was an option.

Pro-life/pro-choice. For years, abortion-rights supporters and opponents picked sides like in a competitive game, and the terms pro-life and pro-choice reflected that sports mentality. That’s how we got where we are, with a significant majority of Americans supporting abortion rights, and yet enough of them have voted for presidents who pledged to nominate Supreme Court justices who would strip those rights away. 2022 taught us just how not-a-game it is. The Associated Press stopped using pro-life and pro-choice, instead employing abortion rights and anti-abortion — terms that more precisely describe what’s at stake. The Inquirer also does this. So should you.

Boxing apparatus. When the city announced in 2020 that, in response to protests, it was installing a “boxing apparatus” around the Marconi Plaza statue of Christopher Columbus, I honestly thought they might be moving the Joe Frazier statue a few blocks north so the legendary pugilist could take on the Italian rapscallion. Instead, the “boxing apparatus” turned out to be just … a box.

Why did the city use a less concise, more inscrutable term? Was the administration trying to fancy-up the fact that it was just nailing together a bunch of wood?

Now that the “boxing apparatus” is no more, the Columbus statue itself has reclaimed its status as the most embarrassing thing about Marconi Plaza.

On my bingo card. According to the NOW Corpus, which tracks words in web-based newspapers and magazines, usage of the word bingo increased more than 500% in the last 10 years. But you aren’t playing that much more bingo. What you are doing, however, is overusing the phrase I didn’t have ___ on my bingo card for the year — the all-purpose, now hackneyed expression of surprise. In 2023, let’s declare that each visit to an actual bingo fund-raiser (try AIDS Fund Philly’s GayBINGO to start) will grant you one authorized use of on my bingo card. Call it your free middle space.

I was today years old when I learned … But alas, you still haven’t learned how to express yourself in an original way. Keep working at it — maybe, in 2023, you’ll come up with something new. That would actually slay.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and cognate objects to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.