Just as there is nothing certain in this world but death and taxes, there is not hing certain in language

but that it will change, and that people will react bad ly. One of the changes people find most offensive is the spread of professional jargon that has been coined to replace simpler, clearer words we already have. A nyone up for some collaborative incentivizing going forward? No? Well, maybe one day your great-grandchildren will be. Here are 12 words that people once though t were horrible gobbledygook that nobody flinches at anymore. 1. Contact While many people still don't like impact as a verb, contact has settled into ve rbdom quite comfortably. But it had a hard time in the beginning. In 1937, it wa s number four on a widely published list of the 10 most "overworked" words, with members of the advertising industry named as the worst offenders. In 1931, an o fficial at Western Union wanted to institute a company-wide ban on the usage. He said the verb shouldn't be allowed "to soil any good Western Union paper." He w ent so far as to say the "loathsome" person who invented this "hideous vulgarism " should have been "destroyed in early childhood," arguing that "so long as we c an meet, get in touch with, make the acquaintance of, be introduced to, call on, interview or talk to people, there can be no Maybe to Saturday or not While interview may have been a proper alternative to contact in 1931, people we ren't always friendly to it, at least in the sense where it means the asking of questions by members of the press. An 1882 book on rhetoric describes how this v erb was "first accepted in jest, then violently denounced, and finally, by a str ange fate, it appears to be accepted with mournful resignation." In 1890, a New York Times article took to task the "newspaper fiends who have forced us to admi t to the rights of citizenship the verb 'to interview.'" These came into fashion in the 1880s, and by 1892, one magazine columnist compla one enc ined about "the way in which the word Pessimism gets flung about of late ounters it at every turn and it is made to serve as the label of almost every ex pression of discontent with the existing order of things." In 1904, another exas perated magazine writer asked, "Who will contribute the first dollar to a fund t o furnish definitions of the words optimism and pessimism to writers who use the words as synonyms of cheerfulness and despondency?" This word was first printed in the February 1895 issue of Embalmers Monthly, whe re it was proposed as a replacement for "undertaker" or "funeral director." Peop le outside the industry didn't much care for it, complaining that it "grates the ear." For decades afterward it was called "ugly," "affected," an "uncouth stran ger," and an "atrocity" of a euphemism. The literary critic Harry Levin called i t a "pseudo-Latinism of dubious currency." 5. Purist In 1883, a journalist named Godfrey Turner went on an awesome rampage against pu rist, writing, "What a word! We have here positively the only instance of an att empt to make a noun, by this clumsy inflection, direct out of a raw adjective." He wasn't done with it yet though, going on to write in another publication, "wh oever first committed to the legibility of black and white that vicious noun-sub stantive has, it may be hoped, lived to repent a deed that offends forever again st verbal purity among all blundering conceits of modern phraseology, [it] stand s distinguished from its misshapen fellows by an unapproachable singularity of m alformation."An 1860 review of a new dictionary of English lamented that author "gives a place to the superfluous word reliable, which has well nigh superseded the old fashioned idiomatic term trustworthy." The reviewer is pleased, however, that the dictionary explains why "this anomalous and deformed word" makes no se nse: To get the intended meaning, the word should be "reliuponable," which would be "ludicrous."