Modern English is full of fail and some words must be banished, according to one Michigan university.

Lake Superior State University (LSSU) in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., released its 36th annual list of banned words for 2011, and criticized sayings they said had been reduced to redundancy.

For the last 35 years, LSSU has published an annual list of abhorred words and phrases submitted by hundreds of students, employees and ordinary citizens. This year over a thousand people participated.

The list has grown in popularity over the years, and a committee of several LSSU students and employees gather together to select the most detestable of the bunch from the nominated words, explained Thomas Pink of LSSU’s public relations office.

Among this year’s words are “epic,” “fail,” “viral,” “refudiate” and the verbs “Google” and “Facebook.”   

“Adding [refudiate] to the English language simply because a part-time politician lacks a spell checker on her cell phone is an action that needs to be repudiated,” commented Dale Humphries of Muskegon, Mich., on the list’s official website.

According to LSSU’s website, nominations can be submitted year-round using an online form.

“We like to keep the list light-hearted, so witty nominations help,” Pink said.  “Most people nominate a word or phrase for overuse. They tell us that they’re sick of hearing it. However, some words get banned for being useless.”

Toronto-based Maclean’s blogger Robyn Urback decided to continue LSSU’s list with selections of her own, poking fun at post-secondary education.

She explained that “the LSSU list got so much attention because the public could relate to the overuse of words such as ‘epic,’ ‘viral,’ et cetera, so, in a way, it was a joke lots of people felt in on.”

Her banned words include “scholarly” (“used only by academics to describe their own academic work”) and “any form of rhyming couplet.”

“I don’t need to ban these kinds of words, I just ban them by not using them,” said Carleton University English professor Rosemary Hoey.

Hoey explained that the words on LSSU’s list represent “a carelessness or decline in our articulation of our language” and “to reduce everything to ‘epic’ proportions, instead of making something a clear statement, clouds it, as well as belittles the conventional meaning of the word.”