I just read an interesting article about banned words. It is a list of 40 words that a certain college university wants to ban everybody from using…ever.  

When I first glanced at this article, I thought, “Great. More political correctness…more garbage.” But as I read through it, I found, to my astonishment, that I agreed with many of the words on the list.  

For example, one of the words is “Bae.”  It stands for “Before Anyone Else,” and means “a person who comes very first in your life,” as in “My bae and I went to the movies.” 

Supposedly, the reason it hit the banned list is because it was being overused. Kids were using it to talk about their favorite foods. (“Ramen noodles are my bae.”) But another reason was because it is just an annoying word. One girl said, “I’d rather be called a babe than a bae any day.”

Another word on the banned list is “foodie.” As one person put it, “I have heard of cooks, chefs, gourmets and gourmands, but what the heck is a foodie? A person who likes food? A person who eats food? A person who knows what food is? Sounds like “foodie” is a synonym for ‘everybody’”.  Another person said it this way: “Do we call people who like wine “winies” or beer lovers “beeries?” Someone who likes to breathe isn’t called an “airie.” It’s nice to know that there are still people with common sense in the world.

This whole thing got me thinking, though. For these words to make the banned list, somebody had to make them up and then use them enough to be annoying. If they can make up words like “bae” and “foodie,” why can’t we make up words too?

Every now and then, we all run into some lazy, annoying, belligerent person who just drives you up a tree. Instead of smiling sweetly and counting to 10, why can’t we just call them a BLAS? (Belligerent, Lazy, Annoying Slob).  It wouldn’t be cruel because they wouldn’t know what you were talking about, and it would make you feel better so you wouldn’t be thinking of ways to run them over when nobody was looking.

On the other hand, we have all seen people who are masters of their craft. Whether it’s welding or cooking or carpentry, it’s fun to watch someone who is really good at what they do. A ten-dollar word for someone like this is “virtuoso,” so we could call them “Virts”. 

Of course, if you called someone a Virt and they didn’t know it was a compliment, they might get mad and then you’d have to explain everything, and that just takes the fun out of it. 

What we really need is a word that means, “The wind has been blowing for four days straight and I’m so grouchy I want to bite somebody.” It wouldn’t have to be a fancy word, in fact it could be something that you could snarl. 

Yep, a really good word for might be “WesternNebraskaInApril”.