Once you start, it’s hard to stop thinking of things you’d love to see the back of in 2015. Men wearing buns, the Cereal Cafe, Russell Brand, people’s opinions of Russell Brand ... I could go on, but I realise that there is something I hate much more, all over the internet: words. Not just any words, but the language young people use in tweets, Instagram posts, Snapchats and whatever else the kids do online these days.

Words like “bae”, which I discover to my horror has been added to the Oxford Dictionary this year. This stands for “before anyone else”, and thus is used to describe your significant other, or perhaps, if you are single, your pet, or even a bottle of cranberry juice as I noted yesterday. I really cannot refresh Twitter fast enough to keep up with all the baes flying around cyberspace.

Of course, language evolves, and as a word-lover I’m all for that, but it seems to be evolving in the wrong direction. Now, when people write online they use a horrible pseudo-emotional language instead of expressing themselves coherently. As someone who meticulously spells out every word of a text or tweet (although I do allow myself an ironic “lolz” occasionally) I am aware that I may sound like an ancient stick-in-the-mud. But because I write for a living, I hate to see language butchered like this.

Take for instance “I can’t even”. It’s basically someone saying they can’t comprehend something and thus cannot express themselves. Perhaps someone got their coffee order wrong. Or they saw a hilarious Ryan Gosling Vine. But it makes me want to shout “You can’t even WHAT???”

And then there’s the utterly loathsome “all the feels”. This is used to signify that the user is having a strong emotion, or perhaps several emotions at once. Maybe they accidentally swiped left on Tinder, or they’ve seen a picture of a dog wearing a hat, or bae hasn’t texted them back. This is troubling, because if you are feeling emotional, the internet really isn’t the place for you. Go and talk to a real person about how that hat-wearing dog makes you feel, for goodness sake.

This mode of expression is breeding a generation that is doing two problematic things simultaneously: having overblown emotional responses to commonplace events, while also being utterly unable to express appropriate and coherent emotions.

So, young people of the internet, what I have to say to you in 2015 is: can you not?