Fappening and 8 Other Words We Wish You'd Stop Using

There are some words out there we wish people would just stop using. 2013 was a a particularly bad year, bringing us selfie, swag, YOLO and twerk. While it takes some words a while to gain mainstream popularity -- "Turnt" was first defined by Urban Dictionary in 2009 but didn't reach the masses until Turn Down For What and the inevitable Vox explainer -- other words like Beyonce's "surfbort" are an instant phenomenom.

Some words start out innocent enough. Selfie wasn't so bad until Ellen's Oscar selfie was retweeted over three million times and your mom started taking selfies. But some words are awful from the beginning. The following list includes a combination of new words that should have never been coined, words that have gotten out of hand, and words that have been destroyed forever by misuse.

Let's just all agree to stop using the following words.

1. Fappening

Hundreds of naked photos of celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Arianna Grande were leaked by 4chan hackers this week. Leaked is probably the wrong word since these photos were deliberatly stolen from private cell phones and distributed online. "Fappening" is the name of the subreddit where these photos are being shared and is, as Urban Dictonary defines it, a "portmanteau of "happening" and "fap", the latter of which in turn is an onomatopoeia for masturbation."

The word, like celebgate itself, is sexist rhetoric that diminishes the violation of privacy and sexual objectification of hundreds of women to a meme. Calls for people to not partake in the Fappening have come from everywhere from Playboy to Lena Dunham and the FBI has opened an investigation into the hacking. But in the meantime can we all just pretend like this gross word never happened?

2. Phablet

Somewhere between the phone and the tablet lives the "Phablet." Phablet was originally coined to describe the Samsung Galaxy Note in 2012 and it seems as though the term, and the phone-tablet combo, is sticking around. With Samsung's sleek new Samsgun note 4 making waves around tech blogs it is safe to say "phablet" isn't going anywhere. And as portmanteaus go, it could be worse but there is something so awkward about the fabulous phone-tablet.

3. Clickbait

Websites like Upworthy and Twitchy realized you could lure readers onto your webpage with hyperbolic and sensationalist headlines and you won't guess what happened next!

Well, actually, you can guess. People clicked. "Clickbait" first appeared on the scene Google Trends last July and it has had a pretty swift and insufferable rise. The term, along with listicle, adorbs, binge-watch, mansplain and many other trendy new words, was added to the Oxford Dictionary this August. You'll be blown away by the full list!

4. Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Okay we cheated. 'Manic Pixie Dream Girl' (MPDG) isn't a word, but it is a phrase that so perfectly captures what it is describing that it began to influence the trope itself. "The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures," film critic Nathin Rabin wrote in 2007 in his review of 'Elizabethtown', "The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition." The MPDG is pervasive -- Natalie Portman in 'Garden State', Kirsten Dunst in 'Elizabethtown', Kate Winslet in 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', Diane Keaton in 'Annie Hall', Zoey Deschanel in pretty much anything -- but it made this list because Rabin himself recently declared he hates the term.

The problem, as so happens with succesful descriptions of tropes , is MPDG stopped being a critique on twee, one dimensional female characters who flirtatiously coaxed protagonists into adventure and started being the trope itself.

In a Salon op-ed this July, Rabin admits he regrets coining the phrase:

"Seven years after I typed that fateful phrase, I’d like to [call] for the death of the “Patriarchal Lie” of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. I would welcome its erasure from public discourse. I’d applaud an end to articles about its countless different permutations. Let’s all try to write better, more nuanced and multidimensional female characters: women with rich inner lives and complicated emotions and total autonomy, who might strum ukuleles or dance in the rain even when there are no men around to marvel at their free-spiritedness. But in the meantime, Manic Pixies, it’s time to put you to rest."

Related: magical negro

5. Momtrepeneur

Are you a mother and an entrepeneur? Well congratulations, you are now a Momtrepreneur! Stemming from the Mommy Blog universe, momtrepeneurs have built quite a community of entrepeneurs who are also mothers.

Momtrepeneur is not on this list because of we don't like moms who are entrepenerus, it made it because it, like momgasm, momocrats and momager, is yet another mom portmanteau that the world just doesn't need.

6. Redditor

Let's get this straight. Reddit does not post images, crash other websites, find criminals, bully people or raise money. Reddit is a website. The users of Reddit are known as Redditors. There are roughly 3 million Redditors and they are the ones who are responsible for what happens on Reddit.

The problem with the term is that for those who are not familiar with Reddit, a Redditor sounds an awful lot like "editor." And while this may be nitpicky and is by no means the fault of redditors themselves, describing Reddit as edited or curated is disingenuous. In Reddit the best posts aren't curated, they rise to the top one upvote at a time.

Related: Youtuber

6. Normcore

Always at the breaking edge of cultural trends, the New York Times defined Normcore as:

Normcore (noun) 1. A fashion movement, c. 2014, in which scruffy young urbanites swear off the tired street-style clichés of the last decade — skinny jeans, wallet chains, flannel shirts — in favor of a less-ironic (but still pretty ironic) embrace of bland, suburban anti-fashion attire. (See Jeans, mom. Sneakers, white.)

2. A sociocultural concept, c. 2013, having nothing to do with fashion, that concerns hipster types learning to get over themselves, sometimes even enough to enjoy mainstream pleasures like football along with the rest of the crowd.

3. An Internet meme that turned into a massive in-joke that the news media keeps falling for.

Whether dad jeans are a serious fashion trend or just hipsters rolling their eyes at media's insistance to name everything they do, normcore has gotten out of hand. Google searches for the term peaked in April 2014 but Carolina Herrera's recent comments at New York Fashion Week reminded us how much we dislike the word.

Related: health goth

7. Brandjacking

Know Your Meme describes Branjacking as "the act of sabotaging a commercial or political social media campaign by re-appropriating the message out of its original context or objective." Brandjacking can be PR's worst nightmare, but derailing corportate campaigns can be both funny and powerful. ZDNet, Businessweek, Mashable and Media Connections have all written about the rise of brandjacking. Even though watching corporate PR campaigns fall apart is great, the term brandjacking is yet another unecessary portmanteaus turned jargon.

8. Feels

Originally "I know the feel bro", feels has taken over the internet. In this context, "feels" is the abbreviation of "all the feelings" and not used as a verb (as in "i feel you"). In 2012, feels were expanded to include the physical location of said feelings when an emotional gif from The Avengers was captioned "right in the feels."

With over 10,000 tweets in the past two weeks using #feels, it is safe to say the word is tired and overused.

9. Infographic

[For this word we have a special note from IBTime's Infographic Editor, Hanna Sender]

Infographics can be wonderful tools for relaying massive amounts of information. They, along with complex interactive data visualizations (which are not the same thing as infographics BTW), are a trendy option for news and explainer sites. But as infographics have gained popularity they have also been thoroughly misused. Not every image with numbers in it is an infographic. A chart made in excel is a chart, not an infographic. A poster with some words and numbers larger than others is not an infographic. Ugly, misleading and badly done graphics abound, and it is giving infographics a bad name. Please just stop.

Honorable mentions: Explainer, Bandwidth (as in "I don't have bandwidth for that", amaze/amazeballs, bingewatch, listicle and, of course, moist.