I’m getting tired of a few words.

Most of all, I’m ready to retire “comeback” from my vocabulary, at least for the next few months. Basically, if you’re name isn’t LL Cool J — just letting me know what your momma said or something — then I don’t want to hear it.

And let’s just be preemptive for a second and strike “mandate” from the available list. Because, really, two percent a mandate does not make, though it is a better margin than one percent.

Now, here’s the tough one. So tough that I’ll allow the word itself, provided come conditions are met.

If you’re going to talk about “change,” please do us all the favor of phrasing your statements in a way that don’t make you sound like a McDonald’s cashier. “I’m offering 35 years of experience of making change.”* Cha-ching. I’m sure that looked better on paper, ma’am. For that matter, understand that there’s change and then there’s real change. Straight up change is like when Mr Rogers would take off his wing-tips and put on his sneakers, trading one thing for something different. But real change is bigger than that, something that causes a paradigm shift, that requires a new mindset to appreciate (or, in cases of negative change, to endure). So just because you’re different literally that what has gone before, that doesn’t mean that you’re automatically a catalyst for real change … or that you “embody change” like some kind of mutant political superhero, shooting beams of electric reform from your eyes.

Unless you can shoot beams of electric reform from your eyes, because that would be freakin’ awesome …