Word Vault 2018

Every year there are so many words invented. Some of them are wonderful additions to our collective vocabulary are truly awful and should not be allowed to survive into the new year. So this is the Word Vault 2018 which gets the words that annoyed most and seals them away hopefully never to be seen, heard or even sensed again.

Here's some words and phrases I'd like to be locked up next year:

Activation

Don't just have a pop-up, "activate the space". The idea is that a space was just lying around doing nothing until it was activated by whatever marketing whizzes came along and "activated" them. I feel sorry for these spaces that sound like they've had electrodes attached to their earlobes and had a current run through them to achieve activation. Just call it an event already.

See also activated foods. It used to be that an almond was pretty good but now it has to be ACTIVATED!

Poojogger

Here's one you can't unhear. In June this year a guy put on his trainers in Brisbane and decide that he needed more of a whole body workout. Including his bowels. He became the poojogger and was exposed for dumping on the doorsteps. And apparently others were doing it too so the Sydney Morning Herald called poojogging a phenomenon.

Canberra Bubble

Hard not to take this personally because I live inside this bubble. Scott Morrison kicked it off in one of his matey-with-the-electorate videos but somehow it became a word of the year for the Australian National Dictionary Centre even though it is two words. But phrase of the year is so not as catchy. 
What does it mean? Basically that people in Canberra don't understand the rest of Australia. It is odd that this comes from politicians who don't get Canberra. They generally fly-in and fly-out without seeing more inside the bubble than the Parliament House and the Qantas Club. 
This year I was asked as Canberra's Lonely Planet Local what the worst thing about the capital city was and it was an easy answer: the politicians. "Fortunately there are only limited sitting weeks when Parliament is in session." 

Fair Dinkum

More political matey-ness as no Australian after 1978 says fair dinkum without a tongue in their cheek. This year it was used to tout "fair dinkum energy" which basically meant ignoring renewables in favour of old mate coal. 
"Let's use a colloquialism to make a big issue simpler - got anything leftover from the 1950s?" 
"Course, I do, cobber!"
It's as cringeworthy as PM Rudd's "fair shake of the sauce bottle".
It was inspiring that Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brookes swiped the word back to create a renewables brand. Fair dinkum word piracy.

Fake News

The neologism that stole an election is way past its use-by date. The Donald needs to put this one away.

Reach out

If I get one more unsolicited email in which a personalised bot reaches out, I'm going to going to quietly sob. It's email and the reach is a metaphor. Unless, "Hi, It's Charles Manson from the Family here. I just wanted to reach out and choke you to death." 

A friend said it's been part of the US lexicon for a while and they've stopped noticing it, but I'm going to reply to any reach out emails with "I just wanted to grab you with this reply and tear out your throat so you can never speak that phrase again." 

An extreme reaction but it might be worth it if just one bot thought a little more carefully about the words it uses.

Give me a shout if you have any words to add. This is just my list and you must have your own peeves.