English is an inventive language, and new words pop up year after year. Some of those words eventually make it into the “official” list of English vocabulary, while others fade away, either because no one is using them any more, or because they’ve been used too much. People who spend their time working with words, like journalists, writers, and editors, usually have strong opinions about the trendy words that may or may not end up as official English. Remember the word bromance, defined as “non-sexual love and affection between two straight males” and sometimes used to describe movies based on that concept? Quite a few “serious” journalists laughed at the term, but in 2010 it was officially adopted into the language and added to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s hard to tell what words will end up popular enough, for long enough, to become part of the OED.

2012 saw the invention of many new words, and of different ways to use existing words. Will any of them make the leap to official English? That’s hard to say. However, the editors at The Atlantic have a list of words they hope will stay in the past. To start out your new year in words, maybe you should leave some of these old ones behind.

artisanal
Once this adjective meant “made by hand, in small batches, by a single producer” but now you’ll find it on labels for everything from bottled water to factory-produced pizza crusts.

ecosystem
The correct definition is “a biological system of organisms and their environment and how they interact together.” If you’re not a botanist, zoologist, or other life sciences researcher, you might want to avoid this word.

epic
Originally referring to a poem of historical deeds that was often so long that reciting the poem took longer than the deeds it described, this word has been so overused as an adjective that anything described as epic just might not be anything worth writing about.

hashtag
As the name for the # character used in social media, it’s not bad – but please, don’t turn it into a verb!

hipster
Back in the 1990s the word hipster took the 1940s word hip and applied it to a group of (usually) child-free, relatively wealthy adults who were on the cutting edge of trends. However, the word has aged, and not well, and it seems like anyone can be a hipster these days.

literally
When used literally, this word is still useful; for example, “to take something literally” means to understand it exactly as said. However, as an emphatic exclamation, it’s not quite as useful.

organically
According to the editors at The Atlantic, even if you are describing something that arose spontaneously from a series of biological interactions, you probably don’t want to use this word to do so.

ping
Another word that is morphing from computer-speak to regular English, to the editors’ dismay; do we really need another way of saying “contact” or “send a message” via computer or any other medium?

twee
This adjective has been around for quite some time, and it probably won’t go away. Twee means “excessively cute, sweet, or sentimental.”

See the full list of words to avoid in 2013 here.