Wake up and smell the passé.
"Break the Internet!" - Attention, celebrities and brands: you cannot "break the Internet." The biggest selfie of the year was Ellen's celeb-packed Oscars selfie, and that turned out to be an ad for Samsung phones. It didn't even give Twitter a hiccup. The bandwith wars between Netflix and Time Warner/Comcast came a lot closer to anything you'd actually call "breaking" the Internet, and their version of breaking it is a lot less fun. Oh, and HBO GO. That thing breaks anytime there's something worth watching.
Basic - We're giving boring people a label now? C'mon. I know it's supposed to be an insult, but you know what boring people are like; they'll appropriate this and make it their own. The price of a conflict-free life of genericness was supposed to be having no identity. It's almost as bad as...
Normcore - UGH, GOD, UGH! SO GROSS! DON'T TOUCH ME! This word makes me feel so disgusting. We're going to act like living out of the L.L. Bean catalog is a specific life choice now? The only way you get to be really basic is by making almost no interesting choices at all. Now there's a hardcore version? I'll not allow it.
"Are butts in?" - Yes. Butts are in. They've never been out. They're butts. Nicki Minaj's butt, Kim K's butt, Iggy's butt, Meghan Trainor's butt, my butt, Hugh Jackman's butt (I dunno if it did anything big this year, but you know it's out there working every day), and most importantly, your butt. Butts are great, but they are not new.
"Bucket Challenge" - The Ice Bucket Challenge to raise money for ALS was inspirational, massively viral, successful, and it kept going for so long that we almost became sick of the idea of charity itself. It was a great idea, and now no one else can do it. We're retiring the "look at me do something briefly uncomfortable instead of donating money" meme unless the next worthy cause can come up with something original.
"Stewart/Colbert/Oliver/etc brutally pummeled, murdered, and eviscerated this politically opposing person/trend/thing" - This very concept was itself gored and disemboweled by John Oliver and even that was enthusiastically carried by everyone, myself included. I still want to see clips from all of these shows (well, there won't be any more Colbert after last week's awesome finale) on workday mornings, but maybe in 2015 we can find a less hyperbolic way of saying "this political comedian touched on a subject in a way that many found compelling and humorous," while still getting clicks. I realize that may be a tough goal for all of us.
Disruption - This is a Silicon Valley term which once meant "replacing an old technology with a new one" and now means "replacing one an entire job market (like, say, taxi drivers) with a new one full of freelancers with no benefits, no security, and less pay."
Ebola - Always nice not to hear Ebola.
"Prank/Social Experiment" - After YouTube star Laci Green exposed serious allegations from female fans and fellow vloggers against popular "prank" video maker Sam Pepper, it led to two positive outcomes: increased reporting from women about other YouTube stars who had taken advantage of their fans, and a condemnation of videos centered around harassing women on the street (or going to poor neighborhoods to pick fights). I mean, I guess taping a crime and seeing how many people will "like" it on YouTube is an experiment, but it's not a very good one.
Rectal feeding/Rectal Rehydration/Dick Cheney - I can't decide which of those phrases is the most repugnant.
"Bush is running for President" - Ah, c'mon, really? Again, like for the 3rd time in 30 years? What's even crazier is that this will be true again in 2024 with George P. Bush. Hillary has not yet declared, so "Clinton is running for President" is not eligible as a 2014 phrase.
GamerGate/"Ethics in journalism" - I really can't top the erudite opinion penned by the folks over at Cracked.com when their readers forced them to address the issue of... well, that part was always confusing: "Gentlemen, do you realize that even if what they're saying is true, then this is still the most pointless fucking bullshit anyone has ever forced us to read?"
"Russian tank columns enter..." - Is just a phrase you don't want to read in the news, period.
"Thug" - Believe it or not, 2014's uptick in the age-old codeword of thug didn't start with Michael Brown, it started with Richard Sherman and his awesome post-game interview way back in January. Sherman, who has a high-paying job and graduated from Stanford University, remained positive and came out looking like a really cool guy in the end. People who enjoy throwing the world thug around also had a great year, but for bad reasons.
"Restore your faith in humanity" - First of all, stop restoring people's faith in humanity. They're just going to be sad the next day. Second, this piece of clickbait is being retired due to overuse. Let's just go with "will slightly improve your opinion of humanity for 12-24 hours" from now on.
Selfie stick - Technically an object, not a phrase, but still needs to die.
"Nude photo leak!" - Maybe we needed the iCloud hack as a country for it to finally sink in—photos people took for themselves or their romantic partners are not our property, and when criminals make them available to us, we become creeps if we look at it. Let this be remembered as the year America finally grew up enough to feel icky about this. Maybe.
"Hack reveals exciting..." - Again, maybe this Sony hack will be good for us in the long run. We were so entranced by the super-embarrassing (and often hilarious) emails from obnoxious Sony executives and movie stars that it took until this week's cancellation of The Interview to realize something serious had actually happened. I'm not saying that nothing that hackers steal meets the public-interest threshold of reporting, but maybe next time if we focus on the "a major company has (probably) been attacked by a foreign government" element as opposed to the "lol rich douchebags being embarrassed" side, theaters would have found the backbone not to pull The Interview.
-Ghazi - As a suffix, it is ugly. Worse, the Benghazi report found nothing to speak of, so even more than in 2013 (and 2012), attaching the suffix -Ghazi just makes it sound like you know there's nothing to be outraged about, yet you want to be outraged anyway. It's worth noting that the two biggest uses of it this year was as an alternate name for GamerGate, and also for BendGate, the "controversy" that the iPhone 6+ will bend if you bend it. So, yeah.
And the winner for the word or phrase of 2014 which most demands instant death is...
Berta Lovejoy - If you don't know to whom I am referring, congratulations. On the downside, you clearly haven't been to YouTube in a year. On the plus side, you've avoided the "le reddit armie" trolls who have turned every popular YouTube video comments section into their personal playgrounds. It's like an interactive Rickroll where you keep forgetting what you're going to see if you scroll down just a bit. It is a little impressive, you must admit, that someone found a way to actually make YouTube comments worse. They're organized, they're fast, and sometimes they're even a little funny. Mostly, they're repetitive, they come from a trolly place, and above all, they're played out.
They are, I'm certain, absolutely hilarious to themselves. They almost exclusively write in the voices of super-extreme parodies of various reddit personalities (the fedora-tipping, m'lady-giving beta-male creep; the unbearable super-atheist, super-liberal blowhard; stoners; or just people who only talk about how cool reddit is) but the most recognizable and successful of the troll accounts is Berta Lovejoy, "Feminist, Promoter of Equality, Love and Peace." The word should really be "Fedora" or "Reddit Armie," I guess, but I feel that Berta embodies the, uh, movement(?) as a whole.
Berta's hyper-militant, often ignorant feminism usually gets the most reaction of all the accounts, perhaps because her satire is perfectly poised to fool a certain amount of anti-feminists while righteously angering their opponents. No matter how much you dislike Berta, though, there's no denying her accuracy in hitting that troll sweet spot. Armie, you've had your 2014. Please let me return to watching videos and reading comments of merely ordinary ignorance and bile. It's important to hear what the uninformed mutterings of the people sound like, and you're drowning them out.
Or, like everyone else in the comments keeps pointing out, I could just add the Hide Fedora extension to my browser.
Runners-up: other phrases that only meant bad things in 2014:
Grand jury/Supreme Court decides- If you were a cop or a "religious corporation," chances are you enjoyed whatever it was that grand juries and the grandest jury of them all, the Supreme Court, decided this year. If not, better luck in '15.
Cosby - Pudding tastes sad now.
Donald Sterling - Giving a bad name to billionaires who have public mistresses everywhere.