Oct 26, 2012 4 min read

I took a walk with my cousin, Audrey, the other day. Actually, we hit the rail trail pretty often (not rain or shine, just shine). We were chatting, and I punctuated my sentence with the word “seriously!” I got the look. You know that sideways glance notifying you that you just annoyed the owner of the face in question. Seriously is a seriously overused word. Askmen.com has created a list of the 10 most overused words in the English language. These 10 words have become so overly spoken and written that they start to lose meaning. It starts to sound like the word Smurf, “That’s so smurf that smurf got all smurfy like that.” I’ll be starting with 10 and working my way backward. Please don’t tell David Letterman I’m stealing his signature shtick. Let’s start with love. You wouldn’t think people would be annoyed by love. It’s love; it’s supposed to be a good thing. But it is the 10th most overused word on the list. I sorta kinda get it. It loses its resonance when you’re cuddling up with a mate at a romantic picnic and you say, “I love you, baby,” and follow it up 10 minutes later with “I love this sandwich.” The ninth most overused word is “literally.” If someone says, “I literally was crushed.” I would stare at them and say, “No. You weren’t crushed or you wouldn’t be standing there all multidimensional like that.” It’s ridiculous, which brings us to word number eight. I personally prefer ridiculous over the new and less-improved word, ridonculous, popularized by the Disney movie, “Bolt.” That movie was awesome, which is another overused word. It chimes in as seventh most on the list. I love awesome, and if you tell me to give it up I’d be all “Whatever.” Whatever is number six. The fifth word on the list is censored, but it rhymes with witch and started its foray into the English language as a word that referred to a female dog. That brings us to seriously, the fourth overexposed word on the list. The third word is so gay. I don’t mean its lame; I mean it’s actually gay. It used to be a happy word, until it somehow became derogatory. “Now we don our gay apparel” is a double entendre in some circles. Then, it went from an overly festive person to mean lame or undesirable. That’s so gay that gay got all gay like that. It’s not nice. Nice is the second most overused word these days. And the number one word that has been overexposed is like! It even has its own button on Facebook. With the exception of gay, I have overused all of these words. It’s going to be hard for me to replace them, but I will curtail my usage. It’s, like, hard, but wouldn’t it be awesome if I stopped using these words? Seriously! And now for something completely different. I want to offer up an apology/correction: Last week, I wrote about Fred Astaire and incorrectly identified him as the lead actor in “Singing in the Rain,” but everyone knows (and I do mean EVERYONE) that it was local hometown hero Gene Kelly who danced and sang in rain. We were able to correct the gaffe in the online copy, but I couldn’t convince anyone into going door-to-door with a Sharpie and scratch it out of every newspaper copy in Washington County and beyond. I apologize for the mistake and, in the future, I will use one of those fact-checking services that keep popping up after every political debate.