My list of truly annoying words and phrases is long. I won’t disturb your day with all of that, Best Beloved (an homage to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories). But I will highlight a couple that have been bugging me lately.

Everyone. Trump uses this word constantly while claiming “everyone” knows this, believes that, or in general thinks the way he does. Nope. It’s always a lie. Everyone doesn’t believe any one particular thing.

Precedent-setting (and it’s opposite unprecedented). Few things are truly unprecedented. So, before one uses this word, one should always do the research. Maybe it is, but often it’s not unprecedented.

The “intelligence” part of artificial intelligence. The I and AI isn’t all that intelligent. That’s a human characteristic relying on a complex neurological system developed, fed, and nurtured by millions of inputs, nature and nurture among them, as well as education, life experiences, expectations met (or not), and too many more to name. Artificial intelligence finds the fruits of human intelligence and regurgitates them as instructed by the promot and the algorithms coded in. If/when artificial intelligence is truly able to mimic human intelligence, as many science fiction writers tell us, humans will be extraneous, and we;ll have to find ways to live with that. See “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov.

The Annual Banished Words List by Lake Superior University. On target every year ( they’re up to 50 years as of this writing.