9 Stupid Words We Should Retire in 2015

9 Slacks/Trousers

I want you to regard this particular entry with a caveat -- I think both of these words are hilarious. Slacks? Oh my God, I'd go shopping for slacks with all of you in a heartbeat. And trousers? What the fuck does that even mean? It's glorious. But only in two contexts -- humorous and unintentionally humorous. If you're sincere and not funny about trousers or slacks, I have no choice but to presume you're a murderer, probably of the serial variety. Like, if you wrote in your day-planner "Iron trousers," and no one else will ever read that, then the next entry in your planner is probably "Gut the mailman and use his sinful flesh to make new slacks. The meat is sweetest near the bone!"

These words are too old-fashioned, like the haberdashers and moperists of yesteryear, to be enjoyed in today's fast-paced world. Why do we need so many words for pants when all we're talking about in every case is cloth that covers your legs? Especially when pants is still a word. And there's jeggings and jeans and khakis and cords and chinos and dungarees and britches and breeches and bloomers. I don't even know if all of those are real words or shit I just made up, like I do. Oh, hey ... clam diggers. What the fuck are those?

The tapestry of the English language is not so rich and robust that it needs to support over a dozen words for pants. Drop your grandpa's trousers and live in the now, friends.

Better Term to Use: Ass tarpaulin

8 Sassy

Have you ever heard anyone use the word sassy with any degree of sincerity or earnestness and not felt squeamish? Go tell a friend you find them sassy and see what happens. Or, just take my advice and realize that if you tell a friend you find them sassy they're going to think you want to insert a finger in their bum. No one wants an unplanned seat on the train to Knuckle Junction. Not really. Probably. Not at work, anyway. Not during the busy time at work.

To the best of my knowledge, sassy is another way of calling someone arrogant, but it seems to refer to a less malevolent sort of arrogance. Well, obviously less, because if you were malevolently sassy, someone would just punch your dick and leave you by the side of the road. That goes for men or women. So sass is a bit of airy-fairy arrogance, maybe even a cute kind of arrogance, and as such it can go fuck a sack of doorknobs, because this world has too many problems ranging from climate change to spontaneous lycanthropy to have to deal with adorable arrogance.

Better Term to Use: Dick (as in, "You're a dick")

7 Romper

This word. Man, I just don't know. Technically, a romper is a one-piece outfit and/or, if you're a little British, it's a person who romps -- a romp being some manner of energetic playing. Now, you may think this is a word no one ever uses anyway, but I ran afoul of it no less than thrice in the last week, and it's blown my mind each and every time. I feel like you're invoking some sort of Victorian-era baby fashion with this word. Like the prince's baby over in England should be wearing gold rompers. Or beggar children who need to bring home a bucket of fish heads each night lest their father lock them in the woodshed, they wear rompers. The rest of us? Slacks and pants should do fine.

Better Term to Use: Body sack

6 Tummy

This word should be the exclusive domain of toddlers if it's to be used at all. And even then, stop abusing your child with dipshit words and just teach them language in the proper manner. Stomach is a damn fine and proper word. Tummy is cutesy weirdness that, when spoken aloud by an adult, is cause for skin crawling. Have you heard a grown human complain of a tummy ache before? It's like watching the town oaf hug a sheep until it quits breathing. Terrifying, yet you feel powerless and a little afraid to draw attention to it.

My Googling tells me the word is an infantile version of stomach, so basically what I just said. You had a baby and maybe it drank some Windex and spun around a bunch of times and tried to say stomach, but tummy was the best it could do. This is not admirable in any way. Try not to repeat the mistake of your chemically fallible baby.

Better Term to Use: Steaming innards

5 Baby Bump

This linguistic abortion is the proprietary brain shart of entertainment news journalism, something that isn't even something. This is intellectual antimatter. Every time some E! flappy potato utters this dismal phrase, an actual news story dies and history simply eats it, sheds a tear for humanity's loss of practical knowledge, and then plugs its ears before we get to the story about which Kardashian is releasing a new line of bee pollen and weasel bile perfume.

When you find yourself at a loss for an expression to denote that a woman is pregnant, why not just say that? Baby Bump sounds for all the world like the injury you might receive from a delicate hammer, or what happened to the heads of those same E! pseudo-journalists each and every of the many times their parents dropped them during their formative years.

Better Term to Use: The Unsleeping City Beneath

4 Bae

As I understand it, bae is the Danish word for poop, which almost redeems this. That's funny. But in the general parlance of our times (which is Twitter, I guess), it seems to mean baby. As in "my baby" or "hey baby, can you pay for this Big Mac, I don't have a job and obviously can't afford it myself?"

Baby is a four-letter word, and therefore has no call to be shortened to some kind of half-grunt/half-alarm call. Bae is the noise you might make when you're actually about to call for your baby but someone kabongs your noggin with a fireplace poker and knocks the oration skills right out of you such that "bae dae gwang" is the only shit you can ever say.

When you use bae in a sentence or, more likely, a few words mouth-shat in an effort to convey some kind of point or desire, you sound like you've just given up. Like you're Senator Kelly in X-Men moments before he blurbles out of existence into a puddle on the floor. You're barely holding your shit together, and bae is the shining monument in your lexicon to this shitty state of your brain. Don't celebrate that. Grab hold of your shit and form complete and solid words. Learn to enunciate. Use your lips, teeth, and tongue together. Say things that require more effort than being kicked in the gut.

Better Term to Use: Love chalupa

3 God/Goddess

Please don't assault me on religious grounds for this. I want you to freely worship your deity of choice in 2015. I just never, ever want to hear anyone refer to another human as a god or goddess again, especially if it's in that "would be patronizing if anyone involved had the mental capacity to understand what that word means" way people talk about treating someone like the god or goddess they are. Because they're not. You're not, I'm not, no one is. Stop that silly shit.

The only thing worse than someone espousing this on someone else's behalf is someone who does it for themselves. And I don't mean to pick on the ladies, but it does seem to happen more often with women than men, calling themselves goddesses. What the fuck did you ever do to elevate yourself to the status of an ethereal being? This is why we live in a society of entitlement and stupidity -- people think they're better than they are. I don't want to bring anyone down, but there's a world of difference between being on the same level as everyone else and being up in the clouds thinking you're wonderful. You're the same as everyone else. When you start thinking you're better than everyone else, that's some arrogant shit that no one wants to deal with. Stop being a god and be an accountant like the rest of us.

Better Term to Use: Nate (or Geraldine or Primrose or whatever your actual name is)

2 Swag

I thought people stopped using this word, but they didn't. They did not. I was on a bus, and I heard some godawful latchkey kids saying it to one another in between gibbering proclamations of how great Maroon 5 is, which we all know is a bullshit lie. Maroon 5 sounds like what happens when a cat meets a sausage grinder on rough seas during a helium storm.

Justin Bieber may have appropriated this word from the Pirates of the Caribbean -- I'm not super up to date on how it winnowed its way into the lexicon, but I do know it relates in some way to looking and/or being cool. Ironically, you are no longer cool if you use the word swag, but such is the ephemeral nature of coolness. It is society's white whale.

Better Term to Use: A keen fashion sense

1 Vaping

When I first heard this term, I thought it was a sarcastic and/or joking sort of behavior similar to kvetching. Like, maybe it involved exasperation and dramatic machinations of some kind. Why did I think that? Because when I see a word with no context whatsoever, I just make up a meaning for it and then, later, if it turns out I was right, I can be amazed at my linguistic prowess. So far that's never happened, but maybe someday.

Apparently, this is totally and seriously just about using a vaporizer and is therefore so much more stupid than my initial guess that it represents a mathematical conundrum by creating a Mobius loop of fucktardedness. Vaporizers, man? Vaping?

This feels like someone trying to make VapoRub hip. Remember VapoRub? It's Vaseline mixed with eucalyptus and hatred, and every old person swears it cures a cold when mostly all it does is sear your sinus cavities open.

This year, don't vape. Just smoke your damn cigarette if you want to. Because smoke is a real word and it sounds cool. Smoked ham. Smokehouse. Smoke and mirrors. Vape has nothing. Sounds like ape and rape. Is that what you want? Stupid-ass word.

Better Term to Use: Still getting cancer

For more from Felix, check out 4 Ways Getting Older Makes You Behave Like an Asshole and 3 Shortcuts to Not Being a Terrible Person.

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