It's another New Year's Day tradition: Lake Superior State University's 30th Annual List of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness.
This year's list might be the best of all time. It includes the beyond trite "über", the shopworn "You're Fired!" (too bad the good folks at LSSU couldn't banish Donald Trump, too), the cringe-inducing "carb," and the appalling hip-hop "izzlespeak."
Three candidates for banishment come from the War on Terror®: "enemy combatant," "pockets of resistance," and "improvised explosive device." Good riddance to all of them.
But the words and phrases most deserving of banishment come from Campaign 2004. They include "battleground state," "flip-flop," and "I approve this messge."
It also includes my personal unfavorite, "red states and "blue states."
These phrases are an oversimplification, something straight out of Politics for Dummies.
Take my home state of Michigan. Gore and Kerry carried it, and we have two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor and lieutenant governor. That makes it blue, right?
But wait. We also have a Republican attorney general and secretary of state; the GOP controls both houses of the legislature; and our House delegation is nine Republicans, six Democrats. So where on the color wheel does that leave us?
The same is true of many other states. Bush carried North and South Dakota by substantial margins, but both states are represented by two Democratic senators. Republican legislators are practically on the endangered list in Maryland and Hawaii, but have Republican governors. Kansas and Oklahoma are Bush states with Democratic governors; California is heavily Democratic but governed by you-know-who. And so on.
It's high time that we banish "red state" and "blue state" from our political lexicon. America is divided enough without TV talking heads reducing our politics to a modern-day version of Lancaster versus York.