Bad Words

Brought to you by all sorts of people.

Some things are better left unspoken. At the moment I'm thinking specifically of made-up words that really should have been left unmade-up, the kind that make you cringe when they pop up in conversation or print. Such as:

• Cabulance: a cab/ambulance. Please pick one.
  
• Feminazi: a woman who's so overzealous about feminism as to appear Nazi-like. Come on, that's just offensive.
  
• Femtor: A female mentor, with fem in place of men because some feminazi wants to make sure you know she achieved her wisdom without any pollution from icky men, thank you very much.
  
• Freemium: a free premium or gift with purchase. A premium is by definition a gift with purchase — which means it's not free, because you had to buy something to get it.
  
• Guesstimate: a guessed estimate. An estimate is a guess; otherwise it would be called a fact. (Thanks to AnnaK for hawking this one up.)
  
• Seancert: a concert by powerpop underdog Sean Altman. Love the singer, hate the word.
  
• Showmercial/infomercial: a commercial that looks like an entertainment program or documentary. A commercial is a commercial no matter what face you put on it, but these kinds are especially annoying because you might get tricked into watching them thinking they're some weird new show. (Salute to the well informed General for these.)
  
• Spanglish/Franglais: mixtures of Spanish or French with English. We already have words for that, like pidgin and patois. (Gracias beau coup, AnnaK.)
  
• Theirself: used in an attempt to write non-gender-biased prose. As in, "Each employee should make theirself familiar with the handbook." I'm willing to take the clunkiness of "himself or herself" over the downright wrongness of "theirself" — but what I'd really like to see is, "All employees should make themselves familiar with the handbook." Or better yet, "Read the employee handbook."
  
• Threepeat: used in sports (and probably elsewhere) to indicate repeating something that's already been done twice, like earning a third championship in a row. This one wouldn't bug me so much if I hadn't started hearing "fourpeat" soon after it emerged. That's just wrong.
  
• Webinar: a web-based seminar. One of the worst corporate jargon offenders ever!

Send me more! Send me some Good Words for tomorrow's counterpart to today's list, too, words like prostidude and confidiocy.

Today around the world: May 3 is National Teacher Day in the U.S. and World Press Freedom Day internationally — two of the most important things we can appreciate and honor, if you ask me.