Word warriors vanquish 'viral,' eradicate 'epic'

DETROIT - It's official: Viral went viral, and now it's beenvirtually vaporized.

Michigan's Lake Superior State University features the termlinked to popular online video clips in its annual List of Words toBe Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use andGeneral Uselessness. The 2011 list, compiled by the university fromnominations submitted from across North America throughout the year,was released Friday.

Nominators did more than vanquish "viral." They also repudiatedSarah Palin's "refudiate," flunked "fail" and weren't at all wowedby "wow factor." In all, 14 words or phrases made the cut to be,well, cut from conversation.

The call to banish viral was vociferous, garnering morenominations than any other.

"This linguistic disease of a term must be quarantined," KuahmelAllah of Los Angeles wrote in his submission. "If one more thinggoes viral, I'm buying a Hazmat suit and moving into a clean-room."

Seconded Lawrence Mickel of Coventry, Conn.: "Any mindless stuntor vapid bit of writing is sent by its creators whirling around theInternet and, once whirled, its creators declare it (trumpets here)'viral!' Enough already!"

Lake Superior State spokesman Tom Pink said viral's death spiralmirrors the trajectory of the typical YouTube clip that becomes amomentary sensation and thus goes viral.

"It starts out small, then grows and people get sick of itbecause they start hearing it everywhere," Pink said.

He said it's among a few entries on the list sentenced to thedialectical dungeon that "have to do with the way we communicatethese days." Another: Facebook or Google used as a verb.

Other entries showed people's apparent aversion to simplelanguage, hence the call to "live life to the fullest" when theycould just live, promoting every foible or stumble to "fail," orsuper-sizing every reasonably good time to an "epic" event.

"Standards for using 'epic' are so low, even 'awesome' isembarrassed." said Mike of Kettering, Ohio, whose submission camewith no last name.

Appropriately, Pink stopped short of describing this year's batchof submissions as "epic." Rather, he viewed it as solid and typical -based on more than 1,000 nominations, once he and his colleaguessorted out phrases previously banned in the list's 36-year history.

For all the words coming in for a "shellacking," he was surprisedPresident Obama's endlessly dissected term to describe his party'sperformance in November's mid-term elections didn't merit one vote.