Slashdot Mirror
Top Searches of 2003, A Dave Odyssey, Banned Words for 2004
Shockmaster writes "Yahoo! has released their top searches of 2003. Google also has a year-end Zeitgeist wrap-up for popular search queries." Elsewhere, TheFairElf writes "The Miami Herald has Dave Barry's annual roundup of the year's main events titled 2003: A Dave Odyssey. The most significant events include the release of the fifth Harry Potter book 'Harry Potter Reaches Puberty and Starts Taking Really Long Showers' and the discovery of large quantities of sugar in Iraq which the CIA claimed 'is a leading cause of tooth decay'." Finally, wideangle writes "'Calling all metrosexuals: Get rid of that bling-bling - or at least find another word for it. In its annual compilation of language irritants, Lake Superior State University singled out 17 words and phrases that it says ought to be banned as overused, trite, euphemistic or just plain inaccurate." LOL, we wish everyone an Xtreme New Year from Slashdot, OMG.
I only count 3 specific words on that list...did i click the wrong link or something?
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
May we look forward to a brave new year of more SCO hilarity
I stayed home tonight. 19 minutes left in 2003! Still time to make "Hao Wu" number one search in world...
I suggest you read Slashdot
Here is the karma whoring link to the list.
I will not stop until AC's are redeemed and have enough karma to post at a minimum of +1.
http://www.metaspy.com/info.metac.spy/metaspy/unfi ltered.htm
See what people are searching for on MetaCrawler...
(standard disclaimer: born and raised 18 years in green bay, wi, so I am permitted to make fun of my hometown)
Never mind, i found it.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Obviously doesn't work if it causes traffic spikes like that!
This is the last "YOU FAIL IT" of 03!
WTF? Your chinese is almost as bad as mine!
i want the 17 words, that link is just a review of the list
blah
Yeah it's already 5:45pm on the 1st of January, but what the hell, I'll wish /. a happy new year anyway.
/. should at least start the new year's post earlier as a nod to everyone overseas for the holidays (or god forbid our overseas constituants)
... here is the last sunset of 2003 as viewed from Queenstown, New Zealand.
...
And look, I didn't even bitch about how
And for anyone that's interested
Have a great year everyone.
-S
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
fop: A man who is preoccupied with and often vain about his clothes and manners.
dandy: A man who affects extreme elegance in clothes and manners.
dapper: a. Neatly dressed; trim. b. Very stylish in dress.
gentleman: A well-mannered and elegant man with high standards of proper behavior.
I can go on...there are others. But come on, pretending the reemergence of the gentleman fop is something new is just retarded. Jumping on the bandwagon of some writer's column...yuk. Might as well start incorporating slogans from WWE into your daily speech, it's the same concept.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
nm
Seems they must have edited it to make it politically correct. I'm betting these are the real ones:
.avi edonkey2000
Top ten Jennifer Searches:
1. Jennifer Lopez naked
2. Jennifer Aniston naked
3. Jennifer Garner naked
4. Jennifer Love Hewitt naked
5. Jennifer Connelly naked
6. Jennifer Ellison naked
7. Jennifer Tilly naked
8. Jennifer Esposito naked
9. Jennifer Capriati naked
10. Jennifer O'Dell naked
Top ten movies:
1. Harry Potter slash fiction
2. Matrix download divx
3. Lord of the Rings download
4. Star Wars dvd download divx
5. X-Men hentai
6. Spiderman fanfic
7. Finding Nemo download
8. Hulk download
9. Matrix Reloaded download
10. The Ring download edonkey
The internet is a sad place.
Every time I hear someone say that, I want to slap the shit out of them. Moreso when the person saying it is white.
My understanding of the word is that it is descriptive of a weak male who is physicially dominated and forced into engaging into submissive sexual acts... usually with another male and often while incarcerated. In that sense... it is fitting that Ashton Kutcher name is now associated with this word... even though he has bastardized its meaning.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
I've already managed to greet New Year, drink champagne, shot several fireworks and have sex with my mare (may it last whole year!) and then even catch some sleep.
Poor americans, delayed on everything.
"quote... unquote". There is no such thing as "unquote" -- it's "end quote". Using "quote unquote" as a prefix to the purported quote is doubly irritating.
"It's like this...." I don't give a blinking fuck what it's like, I want to know what it is.
People who mess up the meanings of precision and accuracy tick me off. 165.04452 +/= 50 is precise, but not very accurate. Abuse of significant digits is another irritant.
You could've hired me.
How about banned sites?
Campaign finance reform is national security.
When ever I find myself confronted with a situation that might call for urban-youth vernacular, I just ask myself, "What Would Justin Timberlake Do?"
At which point "I be front'n" right up until the moment one the homies "unstraps his gat and blasts me."
Actually, I don't think lol is such a bad expression. To me, it means something like "heh" or more like breathing out and saying "is that right?"* in real life. Since you can't express those emotions in words, we made one for use online. OTOH, people misuse lol and say it after everything. That in and of itself is not bad, if there's a funny conversation it seems right to use lol instead of a smiley. I liked smileys back when they weren't turned into gay (sorry, that's a word that needs to go) yellow things. So lol stays as text and works out better.
:) [lol, heh, rofl]
In summary, replace "LOL" with "gay" as an adjective. That would be better.
Also, anyone who says "bling-bling" is going to be shot by me. And anyone who writes in the passive voice.
Wow, the first time a grammar nazi-like post has been on topic. I'll go now
--
* Actually, 'lol ok' == 'is that right?' IMO. My friends and I have shortened that to lok, which is more efficient (save on bandwidth, my friends) than 'is that right?'
My other car is first.
1. letizia ortiz
2. terra
3. gran hermano
Curious... They have trouble finding the Earth?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
It's everywhere on the net! OMG! u r chattin to sum1 then...lol this and lol that....Get it away!"
-Regarding usage of "LOL". Does anyone see anything wrong with this? Personally, I wish people would stop writing U, R, 4, B, 2, etc. It's 1 or 2 extra letters.
But to that all I have to say is... O NVRMND @ THAT LOL! I B 2 COOL 4 AOL N D 0 4 NE WAYS, ROFL!!11!!one!!11! I B A Q T PIE N I B 2 COOL 4 U.
Happy New Year!!! at EST
--
Does anyone remember
LOL and other abbreviated 'e-mail speak,' including the symbol '@' when used in advertising and elsewhere - Alex G. of Warsaw, Poland, says, "It's everywhere on the net! OMG! u r chattin to sum1 then...lol this and lol that....Get it away!" "I wonder if anyone really laughs out loud when they use this short-hand Instant Messenger slang?" Rachel Rose, Pickford, Michigan.
Yay! I was waiting for this day.
Thank god I killed my MSN account a few weeks ago and only use Jabber now. MSN is for people who can't learn to chat properly.
This is surely one of the signs of the Apocalypse...
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Maybe it's the name of a television show.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Calling terms like "metrosexual" or "bling bling" irritating is silly. Language is a living, evolving thing. Lexicographers develop dictionaries by accumulating samples of speech in the real world. Words come and go. Sure, one could say "fop," but it would sound archaic to most of us.
LOL, we wish everyone an Xtreme New Year from Slashdot, OMG.
What does Object Management Group, the maintainer of the CORBA standard, have to do with anything?
We all know the REAL top queries
1. Britney Spears naked
2. Harry Potter torrent
3. Matrix sucked!
4. Shakira's fine fine ass
etc.
schild
editor, f13.net
Did anyone else notice they were off by 4 seconds(at least abc was) and so was the ball... According to time.gov... Not that it matters :-p
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Oh well, as long as we're griping about the misuse of language...
I hate it, it really irritates me, and more and more tards on IRC and in speech are using it. My nephew and two nieces use it, and it's pointless. If phonespeak wasn't bad enough (U R sxy LOL) then the re-interpretation of those into words again IS.
lall
roffal
roftal
yur
omg
I refuse to speak to one of my son's friends who, instead of actually laughing at funny things, stands there with a straight face saying "roftal".
So in what zeit does Wimbledon get geisted over to the Roland Garros Stadium in Paris?
wow. I kept hitting refresh to see the current search,
;)
and that one was always on there. almost every time.
someone else posted that the internet is a sad place.
how true. then I actually clicked on the ratemypoo link
some else posted.
jebus. I didnt think it could really be what it was. it was.
freedom is an ugly thing
Metrosexual? Bling-Bling? Well, I would never use them in a sentence, but if some people find one of them useful, then let them use it. Like many entries in the list, they are words that annoy the committtee them because they're new, not because they're useless or overused. If it really is useless, it will soon cease to be used. That's how language works.
Punked? Actually a useful word, I think. There's no word for "play a elaborate prank on", yet. I think this one annoys them only because it comes from pop culture.
Companion animals: Their smarmy comment "They're called PETS." is probably downright offensive to people who object to the negative connotation of "pet". I call my dogs pets, but I love them, and I can certainly see them as companions.
Smoking gun: "came to us from Iraq". Uh, no it didn't. This term has probably been around for at least decades. Overused? Maybe this year, but that's certainly not cause for banning it evermore.
They're trying to be funny, but they're just demonstrating a failure to understand language evolution.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
They think that Wimbeldon takes place in Paris in the spring!
My other sig is extremely clever...
I've been an auto racing fan for many years. I actually LIKE the stuff and I've turned a lot of professional/geek type people like myself onto it. Us fans have constantly had to fight against the redneck jokes, misunderstanding of the sport, and have struggled to try and convince people that it's far more in depth than just cars going around in circles.
Now I see the Yahoo! top 10 list... KaZaA, Harry Potter, American Idol, Britney Spears, 50 Cent, Eminem, WWE, Paris Hilton, NASCAR, and Cristina Aguilera.
Oh dear Lord, maybe they've been right all along.
Note that the most popular film search on Google for the Netherlands wasn't LOTR, the Matrix, or Finding Nemo; it was 2 Fast 2 Furious.
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
IANAL, but IMNSHO, TLAs and other MIAs should not be banned. After I RTFA, I was ROFLMAO at the proposition that these quips have no place in the lexicon... YMMV, of course, and of course YAETYOO...
England hosts the Wimbledon tournament (at... Wimbledon of all places)!
The X-Files debuted in 1993, well ahead of the "PR-powered phenomonon" ( Phenomenon - now there's an overused word ) of using X in product branding. The X in "X-Games", "X-Box", "X-Wife" refers to 'extreme' ( which, yes, is a trite marketing cliche ). The X in "X-Files" is supposed to connote ideas of mystery or of an unknown quantity.
And of course, there's the following explanation, given in Season 5's Travelers:
Plenty of room in the 'X's indeed. Happy new year everyone.
YLFIOne god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
This is surely one of the signs of the Apocalypse...
No, just a sign that most internet users are horny males. Big surprise there.
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
"The annual Wimbledon tennis tournament takes place at Roland Garros in Paris each spring."
I don't watch tennis (much) but I could've sworn Wimbledon was held at Wimbledon. Since when was it held in Paris?
Max.
The REAL number one search of 2003 was for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, wasn't it?
After typing "LOL" in an IM to my oldest son, he has forbidden me from typing it unless he can actually hear the laughter. Since we usually chat when we're both at home, wisecracks yelled back and forth usually run in parallel to the chat content.
One day, we were chatting while sitting at adjacent computers. My wife walked in, noticed that we were chatting (primarily with each other), and decided that we were both too geeky for her. I figured at least there was SOME kind of communication with my son.
Parenting in the new millenium...
Tim
n/t
lol
--Slashdot readers delight in generalizing the behavior of other Slashdot readers.
Exchange LOL for "overlord".
"Derp de derp."
Those short-lived-hyped words appear all the time... But then they're gone forever (thank godness).
A compilation on such kind of words would be entertaining.
Imagine reviewing the junk from 10, 20 years ago.
And, why not, to include past much-hyped-but-bogus concepts like:
"The end of History"
"Market openness saving poor countries"
"Multimedia kits (being a cd-rom with sound board)"
etcetera
have struggled to try and convince people that it's far more in depth than just cars going around in circles.
Yes. Sometimes, the cars also crash.
~Philly
dammit! don't tell us it's the new year yet!
think about us in the pacific time zone!
you bastards!
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Mod parent up +1, Tragic.
1. KaZaA
2. Harry Potter
3. American Idol
4. Britney Spears
5. 50 Cent
6. Eminem
7. WWE
8. Paris Hilton 9. NASCAR
10. Christina Aguilera
I wonder which ones Yahoo were paid to feature in that "top 10" and which one made the real top 10.
I thought the #1 search has always been "Sex".
Paris Hilton.
Heineken? fuck that shit... Pabst Blue Ribbon!
Actually (I think) that lol, u, rofl and other silly abvertations come from realtime online games where typing time can be very limited and players might not have yet mastered the skill of typing extremely fast. I caught this habbit while playing Age of Kings where communication can be a big part of the game (serriously) and even if it isn't you still wan't to respond when the other player is yapping... just say "lol!!11" (which basicly means... " thats right, keep talking asshole, im coming...") or something similar to distract him.
Ofcourse after I started typing faster and stopped playing that became unnessessary and actually started hating people who say "lol" and "u", especially "u", yep... its 67% less letters and almost 0.001s less typing time but cmon!
Oops.
At least I now know better.
The one that bugs me is "Could care less" - no, you could not care less - that's the point: your amount of 'care' is at zero, and you cannot go lower....
Did I mention that for all intents and purposes, the North Koreans were planning on invading Cuba in a 1951 pickup truck, but called it off because GWB couldn't care less?
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
On a related note, why are explosions always rocking, e.g., "Explosions rock Baghdad"? Why don't they ever roll?
What about using these terms as derogatory? Like describing the teenagers in the mall, all decked out with matching velour track suits, baby blue work boots, and $100 worth of bling-bling..
I'm sure as hell not admiring those kids.. the other day, while returning improperly fitting christmas gifts, I saw mother and teenage son, he longly gazing at the 10 karat cubic zirconia earring in the display case, while she looked around embarrassed that her lame ass white boy SON was shopping for giant ghetto pirate jewelry..
I guess nothing wrong with jewelry on men, but all this plastic 'ice' is a bigger joke than the term bling bling
I hate spyware and spies
How is it that the Harry Potter is second only to Britney Spears on the popular queries list and also below the Simpsons on the fictional characters list?
CmdrTaco's new year's resolution is to not suck anymore dick, but each year for the past five, he's made the same resolution and failed within two hours.
Meanwhile, instead of ringing in the new year by popping open a bottle of champagne, Michael Sims celebrated by ejaculating all over Hemos.
Finally, CowboiKneel celebrated the new year by letting out a minute-long fart to count down the last minute of the old year.
Happy New Year from Slashdot.
Happy New Year you motherfockers!!!
Last I researched it it appeared to have been coined by Deep Throat during the Watergate scandal and means something rather more than "hard evidence." Fingerprints at the scene are hard evidence. If you have a smoking gun you don't need no stinking fingerprints.
Yes, shots really do ring out.
"Harm's way is actually in the dictionary."
Embedded journalist may be a new term but a concept that goes back at least until WWII. It has real and important meaning which is not "at the scene." It may be overused now, seeing as how there are so few embedded journalists in Iraq, but I actually hope the term lasts.
I reserve judgement on lol. I use it, but not often. Yes, when I've actually laughed out loud. Even though I may vote for not getting rid of this one there's no denying that many of the people who use, and abuse, it might be better off done away with.
I'll go along with the rest without much fuss though.
Pet actually means companion animal. Give the PC shit a rest already.
What's wrong with "dandy" or "narcissist"?
X the "X" shit already. Even "Extreme" everything was bugging the hell out of me. It's this decade's "Turbo."
What's with the Iraq War's code names all being about the level of an old Sgt. Rock comic book? Remember him, going out to get the gooks, charging out of a foxhole while pulling the grenade pin with his teeth? George, grow up already.
And trust me. You ain't no Sgt. Rock. No way Jose.
KFG
Avril Lavigne came in 10th in Canada. Oh the irony!
I've never been a nascar fan due to the lack of real technology on the cars. Yes they keep the racing tight and yes that gives us big spectacular crashes, but I'd much rather see them allowed to push the limit tech wise. F1 has far more interesting technology. Personally I think rally is the most exciting racing on TV.
Looking at that top 10 list leaves me very very scared about the state of the world.
Nice work RIAA. By threatening 12 year old girls in housing projects, granmothers and other people who had no clue, you have spread the good news of music sharing far and wide. Only a such a large and well funded organization could create such great advertising. Keep it up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...if they did, they would spell it correctly.
Just because they spell out a homonym, dosen't mean they knew it and just made a typographical error. I fail to see how anyone who knows the meaning of the phrase "intents and purposes" could mistype it as "intensive purposes". These are completely different sets of words.
Another one that I find very irritating is ignorance of the difference between 'Affect' and 'Effect'. However, this one-character substitution might enjoy the benefit of the doubt, if their other usage is good.
I remember growing up being frequently annoyed at my mother's continual corrections of my errors, but I find that I'm now grateful for it almost every day. Language, like code, is a tool, and should be used correctly if it is used at all.
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." -- (Attrib. to Abe Lincoln, Mark Twain, and others)
I resolve to pay my Linux fee to SCO. But then again I am drunk right now and might start using FreeBSD. Who cares if it is dead and all, they got a depeguinator which sounds pretty cool at this point in inebriation.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Normally, bad grammar and malformed words just roll off me. But for some reason this one really gets my back up:
"Incentivize"
The verb form of "incentive", presumably intended to mean, "to provide incentives for," which is another way of saying 'encourage' or 'influence'.
...Except that "incentive" is itself the noun form of the verb "incent", which means to encourage or influence. So you could use an actual word, save five letters, and not look like a pretentious twit.
Don't get me started...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
The LOL ROFL ROFLMAO ROFLMGDMFAO and the like, along with stupid abbreviations used to obscure the point of a conversation (my theory is that it is a vain attempt to make the recipient believe the sender is more intelligent than they really are by obscuring thier point in a stream of unintelligable ASCII) has been on my list for a very long time. I generally ban anyone on any of my IM lists that attempt to talk to me like that and tell them I will unban them when they learn thier lesson and promise never to do that again.
Another popular tactic is to use the poor excuse for an MSN client I wrote a few years back to send them "OMG j00 sh00d 5t0p yoozing 5TVp1D T/\1| LOL!!!!!11111!!!" followed by a bunch of smileys in a very long for loop. It makes a windows 98 machine slow to a crawl suprisingly quickly.
Just doing my part to rid the world of idiots
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
In all of 2003 I didn't search for a single term on the Yahoo! lists.
The Google list is a bit more interesting. I searched for Roland Garros. You know, the flying pioneer and WWI fighter pilot? (Hey, Google, the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament doesn't take place in Paris. Why do you think they call it Wimbledon? Jeez.)
I searched on Winnie the Pooh, but added a +latin. Interesting stuff there on the history of the translation. Very interesting.
I'm searching for a way to avoid any reference to Britney Spears. If you've found a method short of hanging myself let me know.
KFG
I'd really like to do some data mining on those myself.
;-)
Can't they make them available for download? That would be one large access_log file...
Then came Microsoft, with billions of dollars in advertising money. ActiveX, Xbox, the whole fucking eXPerience, blasted at giga dolar levels. They plastered it everywhere, in the Wintel pulp pages, on TV, on billboards even four page fold outs in National Geographic next to bullshit about "green" enviornmentally friendly NiCad batteries. It gets anoying as any heavy rotation crap will. You can add NET to the same list. You told me about it a hundred times Bill, and I still think it sucks. Go away.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Who else hear thought that there were two words:
Rondeyvo and rendezves (phonetic spelling)?
If you only read and never correlate the spelling with the pronunciation, you can be very confused.
Horse devours.
Fellowship 9/11
My aunt is a professional attorney and she says, "I could care less" when she really means, "I couldn't care less."
Hooray for legalese?
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
On the last drive home from Florida, we came up on a white Expedition with chromed up 20's and big ole' black dude behind the wheel. I pointed out the window for my wife and said, "hoo whee! that nigga's BLINGIN'!!"
And yes I am disgusted when I see people like that. Anywhere. Even on tv. Yes, even actors. Disgusted.
DVD-R was one of the top terms. Not DVD+R....
I have always been impressed at the accuracy of
European and asian explosive experts. To wit:
In the US we get reports like "a ten pound or twenty
pound bomb went off".
In Europe they really know , it is usually a "
2.2 lb or maybe a 22 lb bomb".
Nome of the rounding junk!
Maybe the bombers in foreign contries have a
message board system to let the police know
what size of bomb they used.
Mike
Actually, lol isn't to you thought to be such a bad expression. To you, it is understood as something like "heh" or more like "is that right?"* being breathed out and said in real life. Since those emotions cannot be expressed in words, one was made up for use online. OTOH, lol is misused and is said after everything. That in and of itself is not bad, if a funny conversation is being undertaken it seems right for lol to be used instead of a smiley. Smileys were liked by me back when they weren't turned into gay (sorry, that's a word that needs to be gone) yellow things. So lol stays as text and works out better.
:) [lol, heh, rofl]
In summary, "LOL" should be replaced with "gay" as an adjective. That would be better.
Also, anyone by whom "bling-bling" is said is going to be shot by me. And anyone by whom the passive voice is written in.
Wow, the first time a grammar nazi-like post has been on topic. Now you'll be left by me
--
* Actually, 'lol ok' == 'is that right?' IMO. It was shortened to lok by my friends and me, which is more efficient (save on bandwidth, my friends) than 'is that right?'
wtf omfg ffs nfw tbh bs h4x ban plskthx
There's a clear solution to this problem: Ban 13 year olds. Actually, you'd need to take out quite a few other ages as well, but that would be a good start.
a recent 232 articles' thread on usenet's misc.writing and rec.arts.comics.strips had the "Subject: what are the most annoying cliches"...
How could that "fizzle in my snizzle" (or whatever the whole -izzle thing is) be left off? I'll concede I have no clue what it supposedly means, but I assume it means or refers to something. Once it got used in an Old Navy commercial, that was the final straw with me.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
There is a reason that they put "place stamp here" on envelopes, and it's not because they think you don't know where it goes. This is to reinforce that they won't recieve mail "postage due," to draw a contrast to the envelopes that say "postage will be paid by the addressee" in the same place. (what, has everyone forgotten those?)
Basically it cuts down on the costs that the post office has to pay making it very clear to everyone that the addressee will NOT be paying for it. Otherwise they may have to get it halfway across the country before throwing it out.
Hell, I did too. But I allready know my life went down the toilet recently. At least he's not trolling on slashdot on New Years - that's a whole new level of sad. And this is coming from someone whose strongest hope for the new year is getting put out of my misery.
Hang yoursel..oops!
Nevermind.
I noticed they refer to LOL and other short hand as e-mail speak.
How very odd.
This stuff is used extensively in online chat and only occasionally shows up in e-mail. I might add it just as quickly finds itself in real life...
(The phrase 'BRB' was often spoken by chat users in the 1980's often with out realising it much to the dismay of off-line friends)
I seldom if ever see chat speak used in e-mail let alone the more annoying "31337"..
But there is a whole vocabulary that it did enherent from the postal mail...
RSVP..
However about 90% of my e-mail uses phrases that come out of "Things you don't say when doing an advertisment" but then I've never had any respect for spam.
Metrosexual: You mean this woman isn't a metrosexual?
Well... a person who likes to dress up... well that she most certanly is NOT.
But I'd say she looks so much better and she saves on cloathing bills let alone laundry. But if this keeps up she'll be spending most of that in public nudity tickets.
(It's a conspericy to sell cloaths)
Well.. if I want to be a metrosexual I'll have to get my bling bling. Umm yeah me fat bauld my friends would just LOL. Forget it.
I don't actually exist.
"The music industry, in what is seen as a last-ditch effort to halt the sharing of music files on the Internet, asks a federal judge to issue an injunction against `the possession or use of electricity.'"
Patent lawsuit is what I'd really love to NOT see again. . .
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
Wimbledon in Paris ?
And searches for "Carnaval" - why would so many people search for carnival by entering carnaval ?
I was looking over the lists of most popular 2003 search requests for Yahoo and Google, and there weren't any real major surprises there, with one exception. Britney Spears is still pretty high on both lists (#1 for Google, #4 for Yahoo), and I was under the impression that she was already out the door and way down the block.
Which got me to wondering... how honest are these lists? We've read a lot of stories about the great pains Google goes through to score web pages so that a search request will return an unbiased list. But what about the requests themselves? Is Britney still that popular, or is there some massive bank of computers in some dark basement somewhere submitting her name over and over as a search request to drive her up the list?
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
None appear to have made the list this year (or in previous), but I can't be the only one who can't stand people saying "My bad!" The real kicker is that those same people are usually the ones who belt out "It's all good!" Make up your bloody mind!
Amongst South Korean school children, the word "hack" (usually in the form "hacking") is used in both English and Korean with the meaning "to cheat". As in "Teacher! Min-Su [is] hacking!!" (Yes, I am an ELT in Korea :)
Apparently this usage comes via a Japanese influence, but it's used (with the -ing ending), even by students who otherwise speak NO English at all.
Chalk up another level of confucion to an already midunderstood word.
L
Do tell me they're trying to make a joke. If they are can someone tell me what's funny about it.
What I want to see are the REAL lists... not some made-for-public-consumption, disgusting pop-culture crap.
This reminds me of a 2600 'article' entitled "Spying on Yahoo", which clearly showed how fucked up searches really are.
The real top searches would be humorous... the ones they posted are just plain pathetic.
Because precisely of the case you make about LOL (are you really Laughing Out Loud ?) I came up with the col and the gol (Chuckle and Giggle).
I chuckle out loud at my screen numerous times a day but when I write LOL you know I sprayed Coke through my nose onto the keyboard.
Feel free to use my more accurate alternatives to lol, there's no copyright attached.
add- array- everything is an array of services these days... an array this and an array that best practices- how did all this consulting jargon make its way into normal business-speak
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
but I like LOL granted I never actaully LOL when I LOL, but when I use Trillian, a little kid laughs when ever I type LOL. It's so cute.
"I just can't sit while people are saying nonsense in a meeting without saying it's nonsense" J Watson, Sci Am 288:(4)51
Lake Superior State U, wow that is obviously a place of higher learning, with serious subjects and weighty discussion occupying large amounts of the industrious, academically driven students. Then again maybe the sit around and talk about useless inane B$. You be the judge. I would have expected to see reality TV there, afterall we know the networks just plain CAN'T NOT script everything down to the slightest audience chuckle, just ask Ozzy :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
is redundant ? Well, I guess there are other words for them... "Patriotic Reporter" and "Propaganda Mouthpiece" come to mind....
...as long as the data is only mangled within the capibility of the error-recovery system to reconstruct it, there is no error.
;)
This is true in some limited contexts, where the ECC works and you only care about the current result, not the robustness of the system. But, it is merely pedantic to distinguish between a correct data transmission and an erroneous data transmission that was corrected.
It definitely matters to people who are not already familiar with the phrase, and especially to non-native speakers, whose greatest difficulty with English is the idiom.
These people effectively lack the error-correction capability that you describe. They have no way to know that "...intensive purposes..." is really a mangled version of "... intents and purposes...". When they read our sloppy writer's text (or need to ask him to repeat himself), the communication fails.
There is no way for them to figure out the meaning from the written text, and the speaker cannot give the correct meaning because he doesn't know it (he'll have to give a description or some other phrase to convey his meaning).
So, I suppose that if you speak only to a set of people who are already fully familiar with idiomatic English and context, and can correct errors on the fly, it matters little. But, if you want to talk to people in a larger context, or to write well and avoid unintentionally jarring the reader, it does matter. And of course, it also maters to us pedantic types
Happy New Year.
I cannot believe that Google, in their review of the year, made such a huge error as the following:
"The annual Wimbledon tennis tournament takes place at Roland Garros in Paris each spring."
Umm, folks, the Wimbledon tennis tournament takes place at *Wimbledon* in England. The *French Open* Tennis Tournament is what takes place at Roland Garros in Paris.
Next they'll be saying that the American Open tennis tournament takes place in London, and the Australian Open in New York.
I am anarch of all I survey.
The page shows banned words for 2004. Did anyone notice that, at the bottom of the page, they have a link to submit words for 2003's banned list? I think that university may have stumbled upon the secret to time travel, and have been keeping it cleverly under wraps...until now.
the truth. as elusive as it may be, in the cesspool of greed/fear/ego based felonious execrable, that we call corepirate nazi unmerica.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... the enlightening is not frightening.
This is slashdot -- shouldn't we be saying "Happy GNU Year"? :-)
Its gotta be one of the biggest mistakes people make out there. I also hate "needless to say", which means "for anyone of normal intelligence, this is painfully obvious ... so I'd better spell it out for you". That phrase is not unlike an insult, so why use it (unless you want to be insulting)? Their two of the worst ... can't people use the English language anymore? Sheesh!!
It's not the new year without the Washington Posts's annual list of what's out and what's in for 2004.
I thought there would have been more porn type words being searched, or was that the Politically correct terms being searched.. I highly doubt Yahoo would post "Young teens and Donkeys" on their criteria though...
Did anyone else notice that the Google Zeitgeist used the phrase "Ripped from the headlines", which was amongst the 17 phrases that people would like to see banned?
The beauty of the Google Zeitgeist is that you can see weekends! All of their plots show five days of high activity followed by two days of low activity. Look at the congestion plot, for example. I guess people still access the internet from work at lot more than from home.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
Install Proxomitron and set it to filter out all tag pairs containing the term you don't like, like <A HREF="...">Britney Spears</A> Be sure to use a RegExp to catch all misppelings as well.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
It's not as bad as you think... You see, most of those Britney Spears searches were accompanied by words like "must die", and "is evil"!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I became slightly interested in F1 for a couple years when Nissan kept winning. They apparently had a HUGE tech edge on everyone else because their cars would come in first and second, one right behind the other, and then third place would come dawdling in many seconds later. Supposedly Nissan had developed an amazing turbocharging system that gave their cars an unbelievable advantage. But instead of spurring the competition to out-tech Nissan what happened? They complained to the F1 powers-that-be and had a new design rule passed that placed a limitation on the size of the air intake-- which hindered the Nissan turbo enough so that others could win. That idiocy put me off pretty much all car racing forever.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Number 4 on the "most popular news searches" is "bertrand cantat". Perhaps my worldview is too limited, but I'm surprised to discover that #4 is somebody I've never heard of.
Apparently he's a French guy who murdered a French actress. The French must have been searching like crazy for him to bid him up above Korea.
I dislike it very much when anyone says "my bad" after making a mistake. It's so pervasive in pop culture now that we've even heard it on the Simpsons (remember Fat Tony and his cave full of fireworks?). "my bad" is unforgivable when used in speech or print. Instead, one should say "I'm sorry; I've made a mistake" or something similar.
"my bad" makes you sound like a pre-schooler who hasn't yet grasped the English language.
I thought they meant words like: !@#$, @#%$^, and $#%#$%.
Of course the words I posted above are subjectively more or less insulting and I know some would have put on the list things such as @#%#, #@%$^@@$, and %(^#^ but slashdots #$^% lameness filter kicked in and would not let me post too many and so I had to make choices. If you think of a word that I should have added to the list and didn't, you can take a plunger and !@#$ ^$#^^3 while you ^%#$^ yourself (or you can post me a reply listing the ones I missed) but really - who gives a (*&^.
I miss the Karma Whores.
We Build Beautiful Websites
Well now you're getting into my pet peeve area: new-agey business-speak.
"Value-added"
"Best practices"
"Lessons learned"
I just found out that in my home town, there is no longer a police or fire department. Now they are police and fire services. Makes you feel all warm inside, doesn't it?
I would have to say that pricey organizational seminars are the root of this particular evil.
That doesn't seem to work at the CVS magazine rack.
KFG
separate out the wheat from the chaff? Don't we just separate them?
And since when did "leverage" become a verb? What was wrong with "lever"?
(tongue-in-cheek) I'm Harm, so don't you get in my way! 'Nuff said.
--- root@127.0.0.1
1. Considering the amount of Lego posts, I propose banning "Legos". One sheep, two sheep: one Lego, two Lego. 2. Banning the use of "your" in the wrong context as in: "Your going to like this new programming job in India."
From the 2004 List of Banished Words:
The term "smoking gun" did not come "to us from Iraq." Please. It is at least as old as the Watergate scandal.
I hate when people say 'exact, same' or 'same, exact'. "That's the exact, same thing I just did"
... is a popular ISP over there....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... I kid you not, I did not hear any French spoken.
Plenty of Punjabi and Pashtun.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We have indeed arrived at the old question of upgrading in dynamic language, vs the degrading of sloppy language. It may surprise you to hear that I'm actually quite in favor of the dynamic language concept (and wholeheartedly against the French effots to rollback modern/foreign influences on their language). One of my (relatively unsubstantiated) pet theories is that English is becoming the world's de-facto language precisely because England was overrun so many times (Romans, Saxons, Normans, etc.) that the language became very extensible.
;), but it is interesting.
So, how do I find myself arguing on the side of the pedants on this item? It may be partly that I haven't really clearly deliniated the line between changes that enhance the language and changes that degrade it. I'm also not sure that the line will ever be clear, at least not without decades of hindsight.
Thanks to your discussion, I'm thinking that a first cut at this distinction could be to ask if a particular language change is adding any new clarity, brevity, or expression of a new concept or style. If so, then it is an enhancement and should be welcomed. However, if the change simply loses clarity, blurs discinctions or erases historical context, then it should be considered an error to be corected. Is the speaker rifing, or just being sloppy? Of course, pure examples of each will be rare among the interesting cases, but perhaps this might be a useful rule of thumnb.
I must say that I'm intrigued by your argument that the changed version of "intents and purposes" is actually a new word or contraction. I'm sot sure I buy it yet
So, does this make any sense? Do you have any useful way of making these distinctions, or do you just welcome almost all change? And why?