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Top Irritating Words Spawned by Internet
prostoalex writes "If you're launching a new blog into the blogosphere, does the common netiquette allow you to have a separate wiki to go with a blog? If the previous sentence irritated you, you're not alone. Folksonomy, blogosphere, blog, netiquette and blook are among the most hated Internet words, Lulu Blooker Prize research found."
My number 1 term is "mashup". "Netiquette" doesn't bother me so much because it's just a shortening of "Internet Etiquette". Thus "netiquette" is perfectly natural. Similarly if you wanted to call "service combinations" something like "webcombos" I'd have no issue. But "mashup"?!? Who came up with that one? It sounds like it needs potatoes (!) or something. :P
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Like hell that's the one. Try Vlog. I didn't blink twice reading summary's first sentence, but if it had contained any variation on blogging I would've instantly cried that it was excessive.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
Vlog is pretty annoying, but it's not nearly widely used enough to bet he most annoying word ever. Now podcast, which both sounds stupid and isn't even descriptive of the thing it is supposed to mean, is used EVERYWHERE. So much so, and I can't find the link now (sorry), that anythingbutipod.com used to have an official "Anything but iPod podcast." It's so stupid.
If you happen to regularly visit sites that use the word vlog I'm very sorry, that must suck. But most of us never hear or read it. I think you're maybe the third person I've ever seen use it. If you want a similar word to put up there with vlog, and I'd argue is far more annoying than vlog (and I've seen it used about as many times), try vodcast. It means what you think, ick.
Maybe we should finish off the stupid, annoying word argument once and for all and invent the vlodcast. Excuse me now, I have to go vomit.
The Farewell Tour II
first it was e-this and e-that and now it's i-everything. fucking annoying people
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I would prolly vote for prolly. That being said there are prolly other people who prolly find prolly less offensive than something other than prolly. Prolly.
God I hate the word "netizen". And of course "netiquette" is right behind it. Blog is irritating, too. People who are nobodys who whine about no one ever visiting their blog is also pretty annoying. (yes, I am happy to admit I'm a nobody and I don't have a blog!) :) --- also annoying
The term "blook" made the list... which is weird because I've never even heard that word before. A look at Google generated only 300,000 hits. Some of the others I tried had well over a million hits. How could a word in so little usage be so hated?
Then I looked again at the article. The organization who commissioned the survey is called "The Lulu Blooker Prize". The parent organization, Lulu, apparently helps authors sell books as well as "blooks".
My gut feeling here is that the word "blook" barely existed until these guys came up with their business plan, fueled by a little marketing masked as a survey and spread around the internet as an amusing story.
3. Profit
-David
The word 'blog' annoys me, as does 'voip' when it's said as a word (they pronounce it voyp) and not an acronym.
Dealing with wireless vendors for an enterprise-wide deployment, I can't get one meeting without someone bringing up "VoFi" (VoIP over wireless, for the slow ones), despite mention at the beginning that we don't allow VoIP to begin with.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Wikipedia has it pegged as a publication run by the Communist party, so it should occur as no surprise that words like "blog", "blogosphere", and "wiki", which suggest the dissemination of information, are going to be on the list.
l8r, m8, 1337 h4x0r etc.
It's either maths or it's English - not both!
But I don't mind the other words. It's just another culture establishing it's own language. Isn't that how most languages and dialects develop?
If it only were one lost letter, I'd probably even think it's a typo. I tend to occasionally lose a letter or two too.
My biggest gripes are with (1) l33t, and (2) words mangled for no other reason than mangling them.
I mean, take the following example taken verbatim from a COH group chat: "soz m8 g2g gt skewl 2moz" No, literally.
Where shall I even start on that abhomination:
1. "skewl" I mean, what the _bloody_ fuck? It's only one letter shorter than "school", but the "o" in "school" is double, so you don't even need to move your fingers much to type it. And _especially_ for one finger typists (since often the excuse for such monstrosities is "I can't type fast enough"), "skewl" actually involves moving your finger around more.
It's a word mangled by retards just to sound "kewl". Fucktards.
2. "soz", "2moz" and other such use of "z" for half the word endings in the fucking dictionary. I mean, wtf? "Z" doesn't even remotely sound like anything with a "r" in it. And which ending _is_ is supposed to be, anyway? "rry" and "rrow" are very different bits of word.
3. "m8", "2moz" and other such l33t use of digits. Here's a thought for those smackards: not everyone is a native English speaker, so their reflex reading of a digit will be in their mother tongue, not in English. So is it "macht"? (8 = Acht in German. "Macht" = power, or the Force.) Mocho? Mhuit? Or what? You're forcing someone to effectively translate it back and forth, piece by piece, just to discover what it means.
Ah well...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I not only hate the word, I hate the root: "web log". What the fuck is that? An Apache access_log file? In the old days, we used to call them "web sites." A journal "On the Internet!" (tm) didn't need a special unique descriptive name.
How about another annoying word: meatspace? Or anything starting with "Cyber".
"On the Internet" is a trademark of Patent Trolls Inc. We patent any old technology applied to the internet, because applying something to the internet is obviously a new and innovative thing to do worthy of paying us huge piles of cash... And if you do't think so, we just sue you anyway.
Although there are plenty of Web-Two-Point-Oh words that I hate (I clench at the sound of any permutation of podcast, inclusively!), one that I find specially annoying is "log". Even TV commercials use it to mean "visit" or "view", as in "Log on to www.whatever.com", when in fact no authentication credentials (i.e. log-on) is required.
Also, for some stupid reason, when I play WoW, people use it to mean "log-off", as in "my mom's calling, I gotta log, sorry." At first I thought the kids were just keeping track of their quests or something, but it just turned out to mean "log-off" or "log-out". Bleh.
As for TFA, I find specially disturbing the term "godcast". Not because it offends me in any way, but because of what it represents: I would imagine those who would actually be interested in producing or downloading such things would naturally have more respect for their deity than to use the name so loosely. Such insistence on making up words just to sound "cool" at the expense of your own values or any rational meaning, is just plain wrong.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
How does weblog get shortened to 'blog' anyway... Silly.
I think it holds a special annoyance for me because it reminds of when I used to work with some people that thought it was awfully cute to refer to their computer as "My Puter" and I really did want to throttle them in their sleep.
"I can be self-referential if I want to," said Tom, swiftly.
I don't know why this bothers me so much too. I'm not even a native speaker of English. Maybe it's because I feel most of the people who write 'loose' don't even know what the word with that spelling means. Probably it's my imagination that wants to torture me :)
Myself, I would have said "spread". There's really nothing wrong with short, simple, ancient, Anglo-Saxon words.
;-).
Except that we native English speakers have roughly 1000 years of social propaganda telling us that Anglo-Saxon words are coarse and vulgar, while words with Latin or French roots are classy. Greek is OK, too, as long as you don't make the mistake of mixing them (despite the fact that the Romans and French have done this all along
It's hard to fight this sort of attitude.
Then there was Mark Twain, who explained that he wrote "cop" rather than "policeman" because he got paid the same for a 1-syllable word as for a 3-syllable word.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.