It's not people I wish dead. It is a motley collection of words and phrases that at the least should be given indeterminate sentences, none fewer than the years remaining to me and, for the sake of the English language, a lot longer.

These include such locutions as have lost through overuse and ill use whatever heft they may once have had. They are employed carelessly in speaking and writing in ways that grate upon the sensibilities of people who prize the language for what it can be and all too often is not.

Iconic. Now anything from a crumbling 50-year-old parking structure to a boarded-up barbershop in which a person of limited notoriety once had his hair trimmed is termed "iconic." Do those who use the word do so because it sounds sufficiently foreign that it might be heard falling from the lips of a lecturer at the Sorbonne? "Iconic" accounts for a graphic image crafted to represent a personage of note or an object of significance. The Greek word is εικων and is usually associated with a particular representation of a saint. A shack by the side of the road is neither an icon nor is it iconic. It is a shack by the side of the road.

Job creator. Such a person could well be described as "iconic" because he or she is considered messianic in nature, especially by the iconicians of such publications as The Wall Street Journal. So-called job creators are thought by some to be saviors of America because they hold up Congress at gunpoint demanding lower-to-no taxation in return for hiring a small number of the unemployed at or just below the minimum wage to make their iconic widgets. Yet it is neither Mr. nor Mrs. nor yet Ms. Tycoon who creates a job. It is the need or desire for a product or service, which calls for a human mind and set of hands to produce or provide it.

Limited government. This is the supposedly paradisiacal state in which the above-mentioned iconic tycoons wish to dwell, unbothered by regulatory policing of their widget manufactories. They consider "the government" to be a collective buttinski and a drag upon the making of profit. Limited government is to those who long for it a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card that, if in hand, can save them from all the nettlesome rules and regulations common to an enlightened state. "Government" for them is not Lincoln's vision "Of the People, By the People and For the People." It's cops to keep the riffraff in line and out of the fast lane.

Taxpayers. Use of this word is generally avoided by liberal-leaning politicians who appreciate the inconvenient truth first articulated by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. thus: It is true . . . that every exaction of money for an act is a discouragement to the extent of the payment required, but that which in its immediacy is a discouragement may be part of an encouragement when seen in its organic connection with the whole. Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. Holmes viewed the taxpayer as a noble contributor to that civilized society of which he wrote, not as a long-suffering nebbish to be used and abused as an object lesson by antigovernment Tea Party guerillas and their political hostages. Out with "taxpayers." In with "stakeholders."

Terrorism. The "terrorist" is one who commits acts of "terrorism," or so we first learned from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, the Bobbsey Twins of the George W. Bush Administration. From that unfortunate triumvirate we also learned that the United States of America had embarked upon a war against terrorism that -- when you think about it for a while -- would have eventually to be waged against your neighbor's dog, probably one or more of his kids and maybe even against a few of your own relatives. "Terror" is what a person feels when confronted with chaos or mayhem. Perhaps unaccountably, I feel that way when my ears are assaulted with a lot of what passes for music, or when I am forced to listen to a politician call down hellfire-and-damnation judgments on women who dare claim ownership of their own reproductive organs. Such politicians are too clueless to be actual terrorists, but they cause me to feel terror. Let's drop the word altogether and call people who set off bombs -- verbal and otherwise -- "thugs" deserving of lifelong careers in rock busting at remote gulags in the unforgiving tundra of Alaska.

Entitlements. By referring to the already-paid-for benefits of Social Security and Medicare as "entitlements," the right-wing political class hopes to make you clutch your wallet even more tightly than is your wont and curse the senior citizen who depends on both to live a decent, if spare, life in retirement and old age. You may soon be that senior citizen -- you should only live so long. You have contributed through the payroll tax to Social Security and Medicare, and it is your government-of-the-people privilege to rely on both when the time comes. We all despise persons who are perceived as "having a sense of entitlement," meaning that they have not earned that which they desire or even demand. That's the semantic trick played by those who want save the plutocracy from slipping down from the 1% to the 2% -- shaming seniors out of their EARNED retirement benefits.

Religious freedom. Now there's an adjective and a noun that, when used together, can turn a cocktail party conversation into a free-for-all. What the phrase "religious freedom" has been tortured into is a kind of perverse liberty to make other people do or not do what your particular religion commands or condemns. Many evangelical fundamentalists want your kids to be required to pray to Jesus in their public school classroom, and for women never, ever even to think about terminating any pregnancy, regardless of the manner by which they became with child. In such a way does that type construe "religious freedom."