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.
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!
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Oh well, as long as we're griping about the misuse of language...
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...
Words that sound like English are fine. Metrosexual? Fine. I don't know what it means, but it doesn't irritate. Bling bling? Don't you just laugh when you hear that? Or want to injure someone? It's not a word, it's just stupid. We educated folk (or those who think they are ;) need to draw the line somewhere.
Next thing we know, Bush is going to "glork glork" the Iraqi people. Have fun misunderestimating that.
My other car is first.
Calling "calling terms like 'metrosexual' or 'bling bling' irritating" silly is irritating.
~:P
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
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.
The REAL number one search of 2003 was for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, wasn't it?
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.
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".
On a related note, why are explosions always rocking, e.g., "Explosions rock Baghdad"? Why don't they ever roll?
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
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?
...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)
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
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.
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.
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 ?
...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.
It's not the new year without the Washington Posts's annual list of what's out and what's in for 2004.