'Shovel ready' bites the dust as word-ban committee strikes

THE phrase "shovel ready", which was invoked incessantly this year by Barack Obama as a way to sell his administration's $787 billion (£487bn) federal stimulus bill, died yesterday.

The official cause of death was overuse, according to Lake Superior State University, which announced the phrase's demise in its annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.

"Shovel ready" dug its own grave by forcing its way into speeches and out of the mouths of the president and too many other politicians in past months.

"Stick a shovel in it. It's done," seethed Joe Grimm in his nomination to the Word Banishment Committee. Mr Grimm is a visiting journalist at Michigan State University and a former editor at the Detroit Free Press.

"Shovel ready" became a clarion call for the White House as shorthand for the kind of taxpayer-funded work projects that had been through the design and permitting process and were ready to launch.

The phrase was joined in dialectical death on the Michigan school's 35th banned words list by, among others, "czar", "sexting", "tweet" and "teachable moment".

App – as in the iPhone's "there's an app for that" ad – was preceded in death by "killer app", which was banished in 2002.

Many other terms related to the federal stimulus – or the failing economy that inspired it – have been thrown on to the semantic scrapheap for 2010, including "stimulus" (the more blunt "bailout" bit the dust last year), "toxic assets" and "too big to fail" – apparently, failure was an option.

"Shovel ready" is survived by many other scrutinised phrases, including "death panel", "low-hanging fruit" and "door-buster", but none of them should assume immortality.