Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan is a very cold place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Believe it or not, kids go to college up there and at Lake Superior State University they have a time-tested custom that helps pass the cold, dark months.

               They all get together and decide which words and phrases should be banned for the next year.

               I, for one, totally agree with this exercise and wonder why it took a group of dedicated, albeit pasty-hued and shivering academicians to do this vital thing for society.

               The whole thing started in 1975, during the Ford administration and one full year before the Bicentennial. A group of people, led by the university’s public relations director, Bill Rabe, came up with the idea that some words and phrases were so overused, so lame and so stupid that they ought to be officially banned from our conversation and use.

               Here are some words that made the list for 2007. Please never, ever use them again!

 GITMO – The US military’s shorthand for a base in Cuba. I don’t know when the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base was changed to GITMO, but somebody needs to change it back.

 COMBINED CELEBRITY NAMES It is bad enough that our news services spend ten times the effort and reporting time on celebrity doings but do they really have to give them those obnoxious names? Tomkat? Bennifer? Bragelina? Give me a break. Giving celebrity couples idiotic names is nothing new. In times past we had BogCall (Bogart and Becall) Lardy (Laurel and Hardy) and CheeChong (Cheech and Chong).

 NOW PLAYING IN THEATERS – Where else would it be playing? In your garage? Do movies premiere in the waiting rooms of medical clinics? I know when I want to see a first run movie I think about going to the grocery store.

 WE’RE PREGANT – No, she’s pregnant, you’re the daddy, dunderhead. I’m sure when you men get older and come down with various male only maladies you won’t expect your wife to say: “We have prostate cancer” or “We have erectile dysfunction.”

 UNDOCUMENTED ALIEN – If they aren’t here in this country legally they are by definition ‘illegal’. It is like saying a drug dealer is an ‘undocumented pharmacist’. Plus, a great majority of the people we are talking about here are documented – they just have fake documents.

 ARMED ROBBERY/DEAL GONE BAD – Isn’t armed robbery or a drug deal already bad? When was it good?

 ASK YOUR DOCTOR – Now there is an idea. Every time you see one of those insipid advertisements on television that say: “ask your doctor if (fill in the blank) is right for you!” pick up the phone and give him or her a call. I can see it now; it is almost midnight when you get the order from the voice in your television to ask your doctor about “flyzipamaze” (the drug that helps older men keep their zippers up). Definitely call your doctor and expect a visit very soon from kind people in white coats.

 HEALTHY FOOD – Food can’t be “healthy”. It can be “healthful”. Almost all food we eat is dead so it can’t be healthy. You don’t see your food swimming laps at the YMCA or doing chin-ups. Also, when you are told to EAT HEALTHY it can be very confusing. Where can you find healthy and when you do, how to you prepare it?

 CHIPOLTE – I’m not even sure that this is a real word. I personally think it is a new word made up by UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS to confuse us about our Mexican food and make it more expensive. A burrito used to be a burrito. Now it is a chipotle burrito with chipotle marinated meat, chipotle peppers, sprinkled with a chipotle seasoning and smothered in a chipotle sauce.

 AWESOME – This word is annoying to the max. A sunrise over Tahiti can be awesome but a pair of basketball shoes is never awesome. Used in conversation, this word really makes my teeth grind. “I just flunked out of high school -- awesome!” My car just fell over a cliff – awesome!

 ALLEGED – this word is my personal addition to the list because I think its use has gone from being a careful rendition of a news story to being patently stupid. You can catch a murderer with the victim’s severed head still in his left hand, the murder weapon in the right, standing in a pool of the victim’s blood right next to a bulletin board with the court restraining order that was recently issued because he had been hassling the victim and the news would still call him: THE ALLGED MURDERER.