Social media has been around a while. Early engines like mySpace pioneered the field, and facebook broadened the social aspect of the Internet.

The most recent advent of social media however is the hash tag. It allows users to designate certain words or phrases and connects them to a central hub of posts about the hash tag. Tweeters or Intagrammers can connect and unite unlike previous social medium.

However, the hash tag has taken on a life of its own. Advertisers love them. Commercials, TV shows and even songs flash what used to be called number signs before their titles and brands. Hash tags have allowed consumers to join the conversation with their favorite product or celebrity, but more importantly they have made social media ubiquitous.

That’s not even what bugs me though. At this point I understand social media is the future. I understand you can’t do anything without putting it on the Internet and I understand I am almost always in the vicinity of a “selfie,” but there’s little I can do about that.

The problem is with the integration of the “hashtag” into our modern lexicon. The social media term bounced from phones to entertainment and is now engrained in colloquial English. And it sounds ridiculous.

I first experienced this when I saw Robin Thicke’s video to the summer single “Blurred Lines.” Hard to understand as it was, it features strobe-lighted hash tags of random words in between its promiscuous girls and farm animals.

Meant not for social media interaction (unless it was subliminal…) but just for hashtag’s sake, Mr. Thicke’s video proved to be a watershed in the movement of the hash tag.

Since the summer, the hashtag buried itself further into American minds and is only recognizably strange to the trained eye. Blank tags taint advertisements, sitcom conversations and teenage dialogues and no one notices.

For some reason, we aren’t seeing that “hashtag” isn’t even a word. I think at the root, writers and speakers turn to hash tags when they know their ideas lack originality or energy. It’s like using “baby” in songs or “synergy” in a business meeting. They are buzzwords, pop-culture fireworks used  to make their point stick.

There is an easy way to remedy this crisis. Keep hash tags on the phone and don’t cross the line into reality. Don’t desensitize yourself to it either. We can’t help that hash tags dominate television. Just don’t let television dominate you. Read a book. It’ll keep you sane and you won’t need to “hashtag” your arguments.