There are words that show up in practically every ad you see or hear.

They’re so ubiquitous, they don’t mean anything any more.

Remember how in middle school you were taught not to use clichés anymore? These words have the same issue. They don’t carry any weight because they’re overused. If these words were horses, there would be a graveyard of equine bodies being brutalized every day. (See what I did there? Sorry.)

Which words are these? I’m glad you asked.

Iconic

State-of-the-art

Advanced

Unique

Revolutionary

Oh, I hear you say. Those words.

Yes, exactly. Those words. I guarantee you thought of at least one or two ads off the top of your head using one of those words. And you don’t pay any attention to them at all. They might sound good, but they don’t give any information and don’t do much to capture the attention of an audience.

There’s a name for what’s happened: semantic saturation. The words have lost their meaning from overuse, and they are just so much noise.

There are possibly over a million words in the English language, with roughly 500,000 showing up in a comprehensive dictionary, such as The Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition or Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged (source).

With that many choices available, why keep dragging out the same old exhausted terms out? Say what you mean and keep your copy fresh.

(This message brought to you by the Council Against Abuse of Words.)