Sorry. These 5 slang words don’t belong in your writing

If you get a weird satisfaction when you say craptastic or ginormous, please keep it out of your formal writing.

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OK, like, OMG, I’m totally not bagging on you for tweeting or FBing or blogging these words, but they are so bogus in formal writing. LOL

1. Amirite

This trendy favorite of commenters on pop culture websites—meant to suggest a glibly tossed “Am I right?”—has about as much chance of making it into the dictionary as fuhgeddaboudit.

2. Craptastic/craptacular

These mash-ups of, respectively, crap and fantastic and crap and spectacular first cropped up in snarky online lambasting of overhyped pop culture phenomena in the 1990s. I chuckled the first couple of times I came across them, but though they are ideal terms for assuming a sarcastic tone, they are best used in moderation and are not, and perhaps will never become, mainstream expressions of derision. Safer alternatives for general publication include absurd, laughable, ludicrous, preposterous, ridiculous and risible.

3. Genius

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