Lesson one, just begun: growing up is not much fun.
I had a lovely e-mail out of the blue from a former student from 16 years ago recently. He wrote, “[y]ou encouraged me to drop the use of the word ‘seminal,’ which I have done!” Victory is mine!!!
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Historiann 
Hey! I got an advertisement for pre-paid cremation with the video.
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Awesome! Any tips for getting my classmates in a Women’s Studies grad course on methods to stop using that word? I die a bit inside every time I hear it.
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Suggest germinal or ovular as (much less sticky) substitutes.
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I usually suggest “fertile,” which is somewhat gender-neutral, and also, I think, a better model for the way knowledge is created/transmitted. An idea or event doesn’t contain within itself the seeds of later ones, it provides an environment (ground) in which later ones can grow.
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Congratulations! I try to beat that one out of my students too, although I usually spend more time on getting tribe out of their vocabulary.
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“Can I draw it?” No, explain in words. “Just a small drawing” NO! Sometime they do call.
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This might have the ancillary benefit of taking “webinar” down with it. I’d like to see a whole French Revolutionary calendar of new academic terms:
germinal, prairial, messidor, etc. “Colloquia/ums,” kind of make me think of getting mugged in a supper club coat room. Surely there’s something better out there for such a course form. The war for the store in higher ed. will surely have a nomenclatural front. The Electronic Delivery of Educational Services Association [TM] has launched the term “podium” classes as a kind of sneering dismissive for the practice whereby somebody else is actually in the same room and within sight of the active learners; a neologism I could kind of do without.
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A history professor of mine once suggested “generative” instead.
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