topper topper topper

There are some words that should be banned. Forever. Topper is one of them. It's in every crochet magazine I get, and it just looks so damn frumpy. A topper is what you put on a cake, not a sweater, or lace collar, hat, or any other godforsaken clothing item. Top is marginally better, but lacks so much in description that it's pointless to put it in print. Of course this will go on a person's top! It's on the model, right there, on top.

"Wearable," "nipped-in," and "luxe" are other infuriating words. Lucky magazine is especially rife with those descriptions. What would I want with clothing that wasn't wearable? "I had to get this see-through chiffon tunic. It will look great on my wall." Nipped-in just makes me think it's so cold that...well...not to be gross... And luxe is just plain dumb. Is it just not luxurious enough to qualify for an entire word? Like spelling night, "nite?" That's a night that is cute rather than solemn.

I have good company for word-hate (a rather Orwellian term, I think). Dorothy Sayers, in The Mind of the Maker, talks about the origin of evil in writing terms:

The very act of choosing that one "right" word, automatically and necessarily makes every other word in the dictionary a "wrong" word. The "wrongness" is not inherent in the words themselves--each of them may be a "right" word in another place*--their "wrongness" is contingent upon the "rightness" of the chosen word. (*author's footnote: Always excepting, of course, words like "sportsdrome" and "normalcy," which are so steeped in sin that no place is "right" for them, except Hell, or a Dictionary of Barbarisms.)