When Australian authorities announced new quarantine centres, they dubbed them "Centres for National Resilience".

The foundation's executive director Dr Neil James suggested it was just beyond the pale.

"Australians like to pride ourselves on calling a spade a spade," he said.

"But when it comes to quarantine, it seems the plain word wasn't fancy enough."

Each year, the Plain English Foundation gathers dozens of examples of the worst words to highlight the importance of clear public language.

Not surprisingly, COVID-19 featured prominently on the list.

When discussing targets for the vaccine rollout, authorities dubbed these "national vaccination allocation horizons".

Former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian was also taken to task for some doublespeak.

She did a "double adverb with pike" when Sky News asked whether she would consider incentives for vaccinations.

"Absolutely potentially," she said.

Dr James suggested words mattered.

"When facing our worst public health crisis in a century, plain language is critical so the public understand what is happening and what they need to do," he said.

"Yet too often the language was unclear".

2021 was another bad year for euphemism, doublespeak and spin.

Amazon instructed its workers to become "industrial athletes".

Academics suggested we start saying "negative encounter" instead of "shark attack", and police reported on an encounter with "an edged weapon" (a knife).

"It's one thing to overdress the language to make something sound fancier than it is," Dr James said. "But when it starts to deliberately mislead, there is a serious ethical concern."

The foundation's list also highlighted some of the latest jargon and Frankenwords, ranging from Metaverse and non-fungible token ("the latest crypto phenomenon to go mainstream") to gooder and besterest.

"Corporations will always push the language to make something sound more exciting or try to get our attention," Dr James said. "But sometimes it just gets too fancy to understand, and in other cases commits clear crimes against the English language."

Our teenagers contributed "cheugy" and "bussin" to the list.

"Cheugy" means that something is out of style or no longer fashionable, as in: "Those uggs are lowkey cheugy".

A more perplexing example is the use of "bussin" for something good - but only apparently applied to food: "this burger is bussin".

Lady Gaga received the award for Mixed Metaphor of the Year for "I felt a pin drop in my stomach".

The singer embraced method acting as the Gucci heiress who murdered Maurizio Gucci in the movie House of Gucci.

When she later drove past the scene of the crime, she felt as though she'd really killed someone. In the stomach. With pins. "I drove by where Maurizio was shot and I felt a pin drop in my stomach because I was so in my character, and I thought: 'What have I done?"," she said.

The Non-Apology of the Year went to a beauty company which made this dubious concession: "Failing to deliver information in a precise way".

The beauty company touting its green credentials launched a new product labelled in large all caps with "HELLO I'M PAPER BOTTLE". It was a standard plastic bottle wrapped in paper.

When challenged, the company said: "We used the term 'paper bottle' to explain the role of the paper label surrounding the bottle," The Korea Times reported.

"We overlooked the possibility that the naming could mislead people to think the whole packaging is made of paper.

"We apologise for failing to deliver information in a precise way."

We used to call this "not telling the truth".