I am so very tired of hearing about terrorists.  Terrorists are the convenient boogeymen that replace communists for the Republican Party.  We are all supposed to think this is a new and entirely different kind of threat.  Something foreign and, well, Muslim.  Hogwash.

We have lived with "terrorism" for at least 100 years (caution pdf), and were never very terrified by it until it became the necessary foil for the Republican party.  The real terrorists are the folks that take these occasional incidents and turn them into something more than what they are.  My top nomination for a banned word is "terrorism" and all its cognates.  It is pure political rhetoric designed to reinforce the message that we are at constant war (thus, bye bye civil liberties) and to scare us into cow towing to the authoritarians in our midst.