It's that time again -- 2008 still has that new-year smell -- and Lake Superior State University has released its list of banished words and phrases. In a startling reversal, the LSSU committee that targets overused buzzwords has reinstated one from last year's list: Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" is no longer an outlaw, in a nod to the writers strike and as a "gesture of humanitarian relief."

Thank heavens. I can't handle the truthinesslessness.

Topping the list this year is a book title that whipped up into a movie, collided with high-pressure publicity and produced a "perfect storm" of mindless repetition. I quit cold turkey this summer when I actually heard myself complaining about a "perfect storm of transit service disruptions."

That was rock bottom. I thought seriously about rehab.

But at least I have never uttered the word "webinar," let alone attended one. "Webinar," which sounds like an amphibious alien life form, is the extremely ugly spawn of "web" and "seminar." One of those words should have used a condom.

"Waterboarding" has the opposite problem: It sounds like fun! Don't you want to rent the equipment next time you're at the beach? Sure you do! Still, we should probably come up with a more accurate term. "Controlled drowning," maybe. Some smart alecks will ask, "Who would Jesus waterboard?" -- but this is clearly an absurd question. It's "WHOM would Jesus waterboard?"

All of those odd locutions seem to be the product of "wordsmiths," who engage in "wordsmithing," meaning they hammer letters together into words like "webinar."

They must be stopped.

We don't call carpenters "woodsmiths," we don't call advertising people "pitchsmiths" and we don't call coaches "playsmiths." There's a perfectly good word for people who write. It is "underpaid."

And maybe it's time for a decent burial for "X is the new Y." You know: "50 is the new 30," "Fuchsia is the new black," "Tea is the new scotch," etc. But I don't know. A lot of banal blather can fit into that formula, but it can still be a vehicle for insight: One of my single girlfriends observed that "Sane is the new cute."

The misuse of "decimate" is so pervasive that even dictionaries are conceding that most people use it to mean "annihilate, utterly destroy." It doesn't, actually. It means, oddly enough, "reduce by one-tenth."

So if you decimated, say, the state Legislature, there would still be 227.7 of them, which hardly seems worth the effort.

The plague of home renovation and redecorating shows on cable TV has given us the word "pop," in the sense used by designers: "The hint of red really makes this pop."

I'm not sure there's anything we can do to stop professional jargon. Unfortunately, TV spreads quirky professional jargon like a virus, so that now you have average joes on the street describing "a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed" (thank you, officer) instead of "a car going really fast."

You know what bothers me more than "pop"? "Reveal" used as a noun. As in, "Zelda has worked so hard for this makeover, and she's really looking forward to her reveal." Yuck!

The verb "reveal" has a perfectly good noun form: revelation. True, that may sound too biblical and apocalyptic for a woman who has lost 30 pounds, gotten a boob job and put on a tight dress. Still. The use of "the reveal" makes my cerebral cortex pop.

The last two items on the LSSU list come, as so much vile verbiage does, from the world of sports, so it's not surprising that one of them was new to me. (I don't watch sports. Especially the commentary. The only thing duller than watching people in loud clothes run after variously shaped balls is watching neckless men in suits drone about it endlessly afterward. I know, I know -- you can decimate me later.)

"It is what it is" is, well, what it is, as philosophical analyses go. It has a kind of circular Zen quality that hints at deeper meaning while being ultimately quite boring. I gather it began as something losing team members said to avoid saying, "Gosh, we pretty much played like coma patients."

But "under the bus"? As in, "After the team's painful loss, the fans threw the quarterback under the bus"? I love it! I realize it means only that they blamed him, but I enjoy the mental picture.

The hint of violence really makes it pop.