"should", "but", "be" etc. . . it seems that I frequently hear of someone trying to remove a word from usage. Indeed this isn't the first time on CoV that this seems to come up. I remember myself some years ago, getting on an "E-Prime" kick whereby all forms of the verb "to be" were excised from my posts, and some other people were doing it too. I don't think memetics is really about words, that way, so much as it is about the underlying metaphors. A lot of people in the psycho-babble community seem to do this too. I have had more than one counselor tell me to stop using words like "should" and "ought", that somehow they were negative and judgmental or something like that. I remember hearing Dr. Laura once intone that "but" negates everything before it, and of course I think that is just about as silly as she is. I just don't buy any of this, from me or anyone else. Perhaps in some particular instance that is how it works, but I think it is the usage (moving back towards the metaphorical level) of the word and not the words themselves that we should focus on, and we ought to quit worrying so much about particular words.