"SUH-MASH" Those Buzzwords

I remember my high school days on the gymnastics team; team members would shout "YAH-tzee" (the name of the board game) when one gymnast would perform some monumental stunt at an event. Looking back on it now, I think I would be expelled from young adult social life and deemed a social misfit for the rest of my days if I would reuse that obnoxious word in the wrong context.

Language changes and no one can stop it. Technology progresses and social networking enhances at the second. New words are bound to be created. For instance, Dictionary.com posts insightful words of the day for anyone looking to build their personal vocabulary. 
Moreover, an etymologist is a specialist who knows a great deal about etymology, the study of words: their meanings, sounds, and origins. These people are professional word-crafters. Universities will pay etymologists to form new words from roots found in ancient manuscripts and blend pre-existing ones together. However, etymologists are not the only people doing the etymology. People from all walks of life: academic fields, business corporations, government agencies, and popular culture, contribute to the massive influx of jargon in everyday language. Today, jargon that reaches the headlines of social and professional media, soon slips onto the tongues and into the sentences of everyone having a decent conversation or writing some lame status update on Facebook. Jargon, and other technical or social "lingo", that hits the big screens and appears in popular vocabulary for a while - until it becomes unbearable to hear or read - is what I, at least, define as buzzwords.

Buzzwords become pernicious cliches that sabotage legitimate English - or other language - vocabulary, clutter the columns of news articles, trash social media news feeds, and float around in the ether of useless, overused, and annoying words. I am convinced that every white collar worker will honestly shoot anyone who uses the words 'synergy,' 'content,' 'transparency,' 'sustainability,' and 'guru' outside 'the office.' Computer techies and programmers might be overheard at the lab overusing words like 'big data,' 'cloud computing,' 'ajax,' and 'canvas.' Use the contemporary carpe diem buzzword, 'YOLO,' and I guarantee the only social life you have will not last for long. Often times buzzwords numb the mind and impair human communication with bland, vague, and crude vocabulary.

Most people remember Caleb McGillvary, also known as Kai the freewheeling, hatchet-wielding hitcher-hiker, whose interview after the Fresno incident went viral on the internet. In Fresno, California, 2013, Kai killed a man with his hatchet after the man, supposedly, tried to run over a woman at a gas station. During his interview, Kai describes the incident in his hippie slang. He re-enacts the skull shattering moment when he swung his hatchet into the man's skull, shouting, "Smash! Smash! SUH-MASH!" "SUH-MASH" went viral all over the web; it became one of the most popular buzzwords in raps, chats, texts, columns, tweets, and feeds.

Diction and syntax give each person a voice. Voice may either be colloquial, formal, or in be
tween on the spectrum of formal and jargon diction. Buzzwords are fun to use from time to time in lax conversations but the professors hate them in writing, especially when they litter papers and give the writer a filthy and inaccurate voice. So, "SUH-MASH" those buzzwords from your diction.  

 image source: http://article.wn.com/view/2013/02/09/kai_the_hitchhiker_8216smash_smash_smash_8217_remix_video/