OK, time to offer a little unsolicited advice to journalists, bloggers, investigative reporters and your average, lazy, twenty/thirty/forty-something Twitter junkie…

Let’s start with a list of terms to be stricken from newspaper/magazine articles, online news sites, (and I’m referring to legitimate news sites here), blogs of every shape and size, and yes, even those increasingly inane 140-character-long Twitter musings showing up everywhere:

post-truth
“alternative facts”
dog whistle
echo chamber
“alt-right” (…is oh so wrong!)
silent majority
“birther” movement
“American carnage”
“flyover zone”
Make America Great Again™

To use any of these rather ridiculous phrases, while cloaking them as jargon, (or, God forbid, as being legitimately descriptive), is to normalize them, as well as the band of reprobates they stand for and/or relate to. …and so-called ‘normalization’ is precisely what needs to be guarded against right now. There is nothing – absolutely nothing – normal about the idiot brigade governing our nation after the inauguration, so let’s not treat any of them as normal, OK?

While I’m offering unsolicited advice, hey, Millennials, stop trying to be trendy – when I see these terms used by what are supposed to be today’s crop of college-educated, professionally-trained journalists, I cringe, and everyone else with an IQ above 100 should too. No, Hudson, (or Heidi), you don’t score points with digerati by mindlessly regurgitating “code”, (or what you think is “code”), after spending maybe twenty frantic seconds with whatever your search engine of choice is. You don’t gain credibility, you lose it. Nope, rather, that cleverly-obfuscated “code” is just some bit of random mental flotsam surfacing during a Tea Party supporter’s fever dream, trust me. That’s all it is, nothing more. Disregard. Purge. Resist the urge to use. Got it?

It’s time to revert to poly-syllabic terms that are, in fact, truly descriptive; it’s also time to stop cutting/pasting Twitter screen captures into your screeds, all the while thinking you’ve dutifully quoted “…the source…” and, finally, it’s time for some honest-to-goodness long-form reporting based on honest-to-goodness legwork.

Brevity is not [always] an indication of brilliance – sometimes it’s indicative of a lack of effort. …or ability. You decide.

P.S., my ever-growing list of stricken [ridiculous] terms not included in my original post:

dumpster fire
“sh*t show”
red meat
snowflake
“bigly”, “majorly”, “hugely”, etc., etc., (he’s simply illiterate, OK?)
“deep state”
white nationalist – nah, let’s stick with ‘racist puke’, ‘disgusting bigot’ or, in a pinch, ‘raging xenophobe’, shall we?