Let us resolve to retire these words or phrases from popular use:
1. “Blow up.” As in: “This band is blowing up!” Or “My phone is blowing up!” No. Your phone is not blowing up. There are places where phones (and homes, and busses, and city blocks, and on and on) really do blow up. Let’s respect that. (And grieve for it.)
2. “Interrogate.” This was in wide use in academia when I was in graduate school; it’s still around. You find it in the humanities, mostly–an attempt to give a line of inquiry a certain masculine (“masculine”) force and urgency. There are parts of the world where people really do interrogate other people, in ways that should trouble our conscience. Let’s give that experience its proper name; let’s not apply it to humanistic (!) inquiry.
3. “Disrupt.” An attempt to give a heroic cast to the act of re-thinking a process or a space or a routine–as if, by using IdeaPaint in a brainstorming session, you have become a force of nature.
4. “Deep dive.” Such colorful, incongruous figurative language! I should admire it. And yet it’s used so often, and so unthinkingly, that it makes me want to burn my wetsuit.