Far be it from me to put soot in Santa's chimney, but there is a pet peeve I've just got to get off my chest.

There's a word a lot of people bandy about that I would like to see banned from the English language. And now the Japanese have adopted it, too! So, clearly, it's going to take a double-whammy of a ban to expunge this scourge.

I bring this up, mind you, solely in the interests of setting a positive tone for the upcoming year and our confused century. Once this absurd word is out of the way, we all might be able to settle down and relate to each other as we are, in a manner the Japanese term hadaka no tsukiai — literally, "naked association."