Banned Words List Carries Its First Emoticon

DynaSoar writes "Lake Superior State University in Michigan's Upper Peninsula ('The land of four seasons: June, July, August and Winter') has just published its 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. Besides such unsurprising inclusions such as 'green' corporations being 'game changing' due to concern with their 'carbon foot print,' this year's list contains an emoticon for the first time — not a smiley face or variant, but the 'heart' symbol made from the characters 'less than' and 'three.' It's perhaps a sign of the evolution of language, or at least of this volunteer linguistic watchdog group, that a symbol compounded of two characters, neither of them a letter, is considered not only a word, but a particularly egregious one."

Comments

Link to the list

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current.php They appear to either hate political discourse or the sound-bite products of political discourse.

Re:a flashback to the 90's

[betterunixthanunix]

My bible is in Hebrew, you insensitive clod!

Actually, if you are referring to the bibles that the Gideon society leaves in hotel rooms, that is in modern English. You can tell it is in modern English because, as a native English speaker, you have little difficulty reading it. Also, "wife" is not spelled "wyf," as it would be in middle English, and it does not read like German or contain any "ash" (æ) characters, at it would if it were actually old English.

Re:Pity they didn't include "loosers"

[Samah]

Or folks who think "would of" is an acceptable replacement for "would have".