There are certain words that I’m tired of hearing. I dislike these words primarily because they’re weak or incorrect, yet people continually repeat them.

“Toxic” is a word that people should stop using. “Toxic” is a weasel word, in the sense that people use it to make their subjective opinion sound like an objective fact. “Toxic” really means “something I don’t like.” Many people don’t have the courage of their convictions to plainly state that they don’t like something, because they’ve been taught that opinions are all equally valid (they are not). Hence, they need to try to add a little heft to what they’re saying.

You can tell that “Toxic” is a weak word because any time you can describe someone with an actual objective word, it’s always more powerful. Nobody describes Harvey Weinstein as “toxic” because it’s more correct and objective to say that Harvey Weinstein is a rapist. Nobody describes Adolf Hitler as “toxic”, they say he was a mass-murdering Nazi dictator. Your supervisor at the local big box store expects you to show up on time, and that’s exactly what he’s supposed to do, so you have to call him toxic because he isn’t a mass-murdering Nazi dictator or a rapist, no matter how badly you want him to be morally equivalent to those things for hassling you about when you punch in.

“Iconic” is another word that people should stop using. Iconic is supposed to mean something that is a representative symbol, but instead is used to mean “something that I think looked cool or was memorable.”

Christ on the cross, being crucified, is iconic; Christians wear that symbol around their necks to represent their faith. Che Guevara is iconic; communists wear t-shirts of that guy in order to represent that they like his ideas. You see people wearing either of these things and you know what they’re about right away.

Movie roles are not “iconic” unless people create graven images of them (which, some have; like the bust so have of Jean-Luc Picard facepalming). Forrest Gump, the character or the movie, is not iconic. Samuel L. Jackson is a talented actor who has played many roles which are memorable - that does not make him iconic.