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.
May we look forward to a brave new year of more SCO hilarity
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.
Oh well, as long as we're griping about the misuse of language...
I think the problem is that a lot of these don't describe evolution, but devolution.
For example, check out the IGN interview with Orlando Bloom and Liv Tyler.
This is a good example of how a lot of people (including myself) conduct verbal conversations. When it is written down, it is next to impossible to understand. What does "Two takes before last, it's like. (makes weeoowee sound). It's coming to an end." mean? Did his bow break, or fly off a cliff, or turn into the chick from Kung Pow or what?
"Metrosexual" is another example. It is constructed from Greek and/or Latin roots, but it doesn't mean what those words mean at all. Is it someone who has sex with cities? Or exclusively *in* cities? No, it is a bastardized conglomeration of two perfectly good words into one lame one. And, as others have said, "fop" is perfectly suited to describe this kind of person anyway. Read Stephenson's Quicksilver.
"Bling bling" at least has the virtue of being an onomatopoeia, and it's good for a laugh. I mean, really, is there anything that doesn't become funny when it's rendered in gangsta?
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I agree they seem suspicious, perhaps putting Kazaa at #1
was an effort to look legit? In any event looking at the
rest of the page just confirms the decline of the internet
into the abyss.
...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)
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
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.
...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.