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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."

67 of 576 comments (clear)

  1. The list by plover · · Score: 5, Funny
    To save you the trouble of Reading TFA, here they are:

    10. Chump.
    9. Chumpette.
    8. Yours.
    7. Up.
    6. Pimpmobile.
    5. Bite.
    4. My.
    3. Shiny.
    2. Blogosphere.
    1. Ass.

    --
    John
    1. Re:The list by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

    2. Re:The list by aichpvee · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The only one you need to know: podcast. Most annoying word EVER!

      --
      The Farewell Tour II
    3. Re:The list by heptapod · · Score: 5, Funny

      So pretty much any term used at BoingBoing???

    4. Re:The list by Workaphobia · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    5. Re:The list by arun_s · · Score: 5, Informative

      Oblig. maddox link.

      --
      I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
    6. Re:The list by The+Mad+Debugger · · Score: 4, Funny

      I blame Wired. I swear they make up new stupid trendy words just to piss me off. Web 2.0. Bah.

    7. Re:The list by thegrassyknowl · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Bender does say Ass a lot; but I forgot his least used word. What was that again?

      The word 'blog' annoys me, as does 'voip' when it's said as a word (they pronounce it voyp) and not an acronym. Most of the time people saying "voyp" don't even understand what the technology means.

      The term 'hacker' bothers me now because it's been usurped by the media to have a malicious meaning.

      Actually lots of words annoy me...

      'online' is used far too much.

      'NAT firewall' is ponied around too much by clueless people who don't realise that NAT and firewall are two separate parts (that happen to be implemented in the same module).

      The term 'RAID' bothers me too because now you can get "raid" controllers in commodity PC hardware everyone suddely "has a raid". I had one guy actually tell me "I've got a raid in my computer, doesn't it go so much faster now?" even though he had the same lone crappy disk in it that he'd always had. The difference was the $200 RAID controller card he brought to plug only one disk into.

      My numero-uno (un)favourite Internet-era buzzword is 'web app'. What is a web app, exactly? Everything must have a 'web interface' or 'web application component' these days or people aren't interested in it. How does that work? My ADSL router has a 'web interface' and for the most part it's just crappy.

      --
      I drink to make other people interesting!
    8. Re:The list by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

      Mashup comes from the underground music scene. It's when people download two copyrighted pieces of music which required lots of musical ability to produce and mix them together ironically on their Mac (which requires a hell of a lot less ability) and then generously donate the result to the Creative Commons.

      Actually, that reminds me of my least favourite word, digerati. It's the blogosphere equivalent of the popular group in an American high school. Annoyingly it's usually used by socially well connected Web 2.0 types who have little talent or idea about the underlying technology.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    9. Re:The list by krelian · · Score: 5, Funny

      I cant think of any words spawned by the internet which I really dislike but one internet phenomena that irritates me are people who reply to the first comment just to get their post near the top even though they have no intention to actually reply to the parent.

    10. Re:The list by AoT · · Score: 4, Funny

      I hate the damn word. It sounds like it should be a swear word. "Aaaah, blog it!"

      Nothing wrong with the things, you know I had a blog before the were even called blogs.(gotta build up my internet cred.)

      Back then we had to telnet in, both ways! Over dial-up if we were lucky, or else we would just make weird noises on the phone. "kshhhhhh boing, boing! Kshhhhhhhh."

      Ahh the god old days.

    11. Re:The list by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

      Actually, 'mashup' is a word used in Jamaica and some other former British colonies in Britain.

      I meant to say 'British colonies in the Caribbean'. Need sleep....


      What you originally wrote made perfect sense to me. I thought you meant South London.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    12. Re:The list by Phroggy · · Score: 3, Informative

      According to Wikipedia, the name "Podcast" was first suggested in this article in February 2004.

      By the way, anyone who blames Apple for the name "Podcast" should note that Apple didn't get on board the Podcasting bandwagon until over a year later. Of course Apple is happy with the name, and Microsoft hates it.

      --
      $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
      $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
    13. Re:The list by Dal+Platinum · · Score: 5, Funny

      Luxury.

      I had to write my first blog by hand.

      In binary.

      And then take a sack full of paper two towns over, barefoot, to have it moderated.

      Getting your post flamed back then was a whole different story.

      sigh.

    14. Re:The list by walt-sjc · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    15. Re:The list by Dogtanian · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I cant think of any words spawned by the internet which I really dislike but one internet phenomena that irritates me are people who reply to the first comment just to get their post near the top even though they have no intention to actually reply to the parent. I agree. ;-) Some of the words in the list are just worthless "Day Today" style neologisms. (Pet hate, "blogosphere", which sounds like something made up by a nerdy and pretentious 14-year-old who isn't half as smart as he likes to think he is. "Podcast" falls into that category too, and "Web 2.0" is similarly loathsome).

      However, some of the other words are okay in themselves (e.g. "meme", "cookie".... actually, I'm surprised that cookie was in the list at all). I think that a lot of them have been soiled by association with pretentious twats who wanted to get their name in Wired and overused them.
      --
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    16. Re:The list by RMH101 · · Score: 3, Funny

      "Verbing weirds language"

    17. Re:The list by Scrameustache · · Score: 3, Funny

      Actually, 'mashup' is a word used in Jamaica and some other former British colonies in Britain.
      I meant to say 'British colonies in the Caribbean'. Need sleep....


      What you originally wrote made perfect sense to me. I thought you meant South London. 2007, the British Empire lays in ruin.
      Foreigners walk the streets, many of them... Hungarian. (The foreigners, not the streets.)
      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

    18. Re:The list by hobo+sapiens · · Score: 3, Informative

      Maybe. Like I said, I knew what he was trying to say.

      Asynchronous is one of those words like inflammable. If you think about it too long, your brain hurts. Asynchronous means things not happening at the same time. Thus people cannot collaborate on a document at the same time. Of course, in computing, asynchronous takes on a different meaning, though it essentially means the same thing only on a very small scale, which in turn allows more instant updates / refreshes, which flips the definition.

      He should have just said that Sharepoint allows people to work together interactively on a document. Plain speech doesn't make you sound dumb. It takes a sharp mind to take complex concepts and make them simple and easily understood. Any idiot can take complex things (or for the bigger idiot, simple things) and make them complex. Which brings me back to software vendors and buzzwords...

      --
      blah blah blah
    19. Re:The list by grammar+fascist · · Score: 4, Funny

      You were lucky.

      In my day, I had to write my first blog post by scratching the symbols on stone with my teeth. I did it in unary. With little bison as the digits. (Three bison followed by four means "mood: hungry".) If you wanted your post read, you removed it from the cave wall with your bare fingers and then traveled, beating people over the head with it.

      Don't get me started on my grandpa's first blog post. He had to emit a chemical signal, which was released by wiggling his flagellum...

      --
      I got my Linux laptop at System76.
    20. Re:The list by jc42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Slashdot's discussion system is fundamentally broken, and only the first couple of posters get any real attention.

      Indeed; it's usually difficult to even find the top-level replies.

      I've often wished there were a mode of access that would show me only the first-level replies, each accompanied by a button/link that would expand it and show its 2nd-level replies, and so on recursively.

      That way, I could easily spot and avoid the parts of the tree that degenerate to OT flamefests about religion, politics, Micro$oft, whatever. And I'd probably read at level 1 or 0 rather than the 2 or 3 I usually use now, because there are lots of good posts at the lower levels, and they'd be easier to separate from the chaff.

      Now if I could only get my hands on the code and surreptitiously implement it ...

      --
      Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
    21. Re:The list by d34thm0nk3y · · Score: 3, Funny

      No, you were lucky.

      Back in my day people who made these tired ass "back in my day" jokes in every single damn thread got shot in the face.

      Now get off my lawn!

  2. FP by JEGSYDAU · · Score: 5, Funny

    OMG PONIEZ First post.... Now THAT's annoying.

    --
    JEG / SYD / AU
  3. Folksonomy??? by EEBaum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Folksonomy is the #1 most hated word??? This poll is the first time I've even heard it. Same goes for blook.
    I call shenanigans!

    --
    -- I prefer the term "karma escort."
    1. Re:Folksonomy??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Folksonomy is the #1 most hated word??? This poll is the first time I've even heard it.

      Yes, and now don't you hate it! ARGH!
  4. I hate ... by Tink2000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Anything with 133t. Noob. Lol and all derivatives thereof. And I've never heard blook or folksonomy -- must be a UK thing.

  5. 3 obvious missing words .. by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Funny
    Where are:
    1. goatse.cz
    2. tubgirl.jpg
    3. 133t

    I mean really! The list sounds like they're stuck in the early '80s.

  6. xkcd Annoying Internet Terms Grid by Compholio · · Score: 4, Funny
  7. Top of the list... by bennomatic · · Score: 5, Funny
    Slashdotted!

    --
    The CB App. What's your 20?
  8. mashup by shird · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This should be a poll... "mashup" would get my vote. Its a lame attempt to seem 'cool' but in reality makes my skin crawl reading it.

    --
    I.O.U One Sig.
  9. The poll. by Zeebs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The poll also showed that respondants had a desire for children to 'get off their lawn'.

    --

    Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
    1. Re:The poll. by thegrassyknowl · · Score: 4, Funny

      It is true, old people are often concerned that children are playing on their lawn!

      --
      I drink to make other people interesting!
  10. Re:Yes, I am a grammar Nazi by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Funny

    I see your "Grammar Nazi" and raise you a "Creative Interpretation" :-)

    PROLLY

    It's PROBABLY people!

    Then again, while its probably people, it might be a script ... or a dog ... after all, on the internet, nobody knows if ...

  11. Word compression by kihjin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    My eyes find great displeasure in seeing the "word" wat.

    This is one abbreviation that I feel needs to "gtfo."

    For those unaware linguists out there: wat tends to be the abbreviated form of what

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    This slashdot-related signature is a stub. You can help kihjin by expanding it.
    1. Re:Word compression by AusIV · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Same here. My biggest gripes are when people are simply too lazy to type a couple of letters. While I am one of the faster typists around, it just seems incredibly lazy to write "wat" or "wut" instead of "what". I don't mind (and occasionally use) abbreviations such as "lol" (though Ha ha generally seems appropriate and is only 2 characters longer), and WTF - which is generally used to tone down language.


      It also bothers me when people use abbreviations I've never heard of. It took me for ever to figure out what IANAL stood for (for those who still don't know, "I Am Not A Lawyer").

    2. Re:Word compression by rts008 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yeah, you have the:

      iPod, iPhone, and now the IANAL...for lawyers.
      The IANAL started life as a 90 pound jackhammer powered by an 80 horsepower diesel driven air compressor, modified to run off of your USB port. As an added bonus, it retains the quick change tool-tip feature, so it can still be used as a jackhammer if needed!

      Be the first lawyer on your block with IANAL. Liven up your next Bar Association meeting, wow your friends, and you too can be the next goatse!

      --
      Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
  12. LOOSE by PingXao · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As in loose your ability spell. Most people who spell 'lose' this way prolly never learned to spell in the first place. It drives me up a wall every time I see it.

    1. Re:LOOSE by dp3n3tr8 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  13. MIssing an important one by Fett101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Amazed they left out the worst buzzword ever. Web 2.0 *shudder*

  14. 1337 speak by GFree · · Score: 3, Funny

    Anything that encompasses "leet/1337" speak. I was fine with it years ago, but now it's become tiresome.

    There are only so many times the phrase "OMG I PWNED J00 N00BZ0RZ LOLOLOLOL" can be uttered over VoIP before you want to punch the little shit in the head.

  15. Consider the Source..... by rueger · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks"-books based on blogs or other websites, including webcomics."

    No punchline needed....

  16. Re:Not the first post! by megaditto · · Score: 5, Funny

    Fortune for you!

    --
    Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
  17. Cookie?? by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How is the word "cookie" annoying. That's what it's called, and I don't know any other word for it. Internet words that are annoying fall into a couple of categories:

    1. Words exists for this concept, and I'm going to combine them and think I sound cool. E.g. "Internet Etiquette" -> "Net Etiquette" -> "Netiquette"
    2. There's a technology that already exists and has a name, but I'm going to invent a new word for it and think I'm on the cutting edge. E.g. "Streaming Audio" -> "Podcast"
    3. I'm going to modify the word "Blog" in some way, and annoy everyone
    4. Let me artificially abbreviate/omit words/punctuation because I don't know how to type. E.g. "It is probably too late for the movie" -> "Prbbly 2 late 4 mov"
    5. 1337 speak.
    --
    Your ad here. Ask me how!
  18. Most annoying phrase... by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 3, Funny
    1. In Soviet Russia, post firsts you!
    2. ???????
    3. All your profit are belong to us.
    --
    Your ad here. Ask me how!
  19. Netiquette? by Lewisham · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The only people that voted for Netiquette are the people that don't understand why it used to exist in the first place.

    I remember the times when good netiquette was thought essential (which was not that long ago).

    "lol ur a netiket fag i typ lik i want"

  20. Spam terms by Infonaut · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yes, they exist independent of the Internet, but damn, I've grown to hate these terms:

    1. Viagra
    2. Adobe Creative Suite 3
    3. Greetings, I am ...
    4. Credit
    5. 0EM Softwares
    6. Watch this stock
    7. Allume Systems - A Smith Micro Company
    8. Auto CAD
    9. Weight loss
    10. Bank
    --
    Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
  21. needless prefixing by timmarhy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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....
  22. aah, STFU by Max+Littlemore · · Score: 3, Funny

    I quite like STFU. It stands for something, but when you read it as a word, it's kinda like "stuff you". I think that's kinda neat.

    IANAL, on the other hand....
    IANAL annoys the b'jesus out of me. What is that, some kind of Apple butt plug?

    --
    I don't therefore I'm not.
  23. Netizen by Count+Porkula · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

  24. "Blook" - Something is Fishy by DavidD_CA · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  25. Netiquette by arth1 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Correction: "Netiquette" is a much older term than what many seem to think, and stands for network etiquette, not Internet etiquette.
    Netiquette applies just as much to Fidonet, Bitnet, Usenet[1] and other networks.

    [1]: Usenet isn't all inside Internet. It becomes more and more so with time, but there's still nodes that use other forms of propagation, whether it's BBS gateways, Fidonet or UUCP.

    1. Re:Netiquette by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Funny

      Usenet has etiquette? Who'd have thought?

    2. Re:Netiquette by andi75 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Etiquette on usenet traditionally broke down only in September, until the new students learned some manners. In 1993 came AOL, and with it the Eternal September.

      Now get off my lawn, kids.

  26. Re:Wired's Memes by Your.Master · · Score: 4, Informative
    From dictionary.com:

    promulgate /prmlget, promlget/
    -verb (used with object), -gated, -gating.
    1. to make known by open declaration; publish; proclaim formally or put into operation (a law, decree of a court, etc.).
    2. to set forth or teach publicly (a creed, doctrine, etc.).


    I think promulgate works fine. Wird is making them known by open declaration, it's publishing it, and in a sense it's teaching an "etc." publicly. It might be slightly awkward in that sentence, but no more so than propagate would be.

    Myself, I would have said "spread". There's really nothing wrong with short, simple, ancient, Anglo-Saxon words.
  27. Words on the Internet that irritate me by VGPowerlord · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have a completely different list of words from the Internet that irritate me.

    For example, my list starts out with "u" and "r" and continues with other words that are caused by people being too lazy to type the extra few characters that real words contain.

    --
    GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
  28. Re:"Blook" - Something is Fishy by Shohat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have to agree here.
    I run several sites, blog, have a youtube channel and am a an active Wikipedian(now that's an annoying word) and generally am an annoying Web2.0 whore to most people. I also buy books online, read reviews, etc...
    Never if my fucking life have I heard of a blook. This is clearly a very well executed marketing stunt to promote the usage of the term blook, and the phenomena itself. Remember, that even silly ideas with microscopic demand (such as podcasts), once fueled with enough hype and publicity, and 3-5 analyst reviews claiming some start-up in that field is worth 100 million, can generate enough buzz for Google/Yahoo/MS to buy some of the Blook-platform-providing companies, just in case.

  29. Fanboi by stewbacca · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Fanboi is my most hated. First, the lazy spelling... second, the misuse of the intention of the word. If I give PhD quality reserach findings about Topic X and some slashdot a$$hole has a different (and commonly incorrect) opinion, suddenly I'm a fanboi.

    Just because people like something, and they come to a forum to talk about it doesn't give some of you jerks the right to fling "fanboi" around. Same goes for Troll. I'm no troll (unless I'm playing WoW), but am often labeled as such for no apparent reason other than having a strong opinion backed with logical reasoning.

    1. Re:Fanboi by 91degrees · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If I give PhD quality reserach findings about Topic X and some slashdot a$$hole has a different (and commonly incorrect) opinion, suddenly I'm a fanboi.

      If it helps, this is a well known phenonemon.

    2. Re:Fanboi by Aladrin · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would bet that most of the time you're called a troll is because of how you state the information, instead of what information you state. Using a lot of insults is the most common, but presenting things as totally one-sided will do it also.

      As for 'lazy spelling'... It's not. It's an additional deliberate insult. 'boi' is used to mean 'gay boy', so they are insulting your fanatical one-sidedness as well as calling you 'gay'. 'Fanboys' are simply fanatically one-sided.

      If you're giving 'PhD quality' information, you are probably also talking over their heads. If you sound like you are just spewing 'big words', they are going to think you are only trying to confuse them with made-up information. (It's a self protection mechanism. If they knew how stupid they were, they couldn't deal with life.) High-level logic is totally pointless with these people, and dumbing the logic down to a sufficient level is rarely going to be worth your time.

      Personally, I've just accepted the fact that there are more idiots than geniuses, and I've quit responding -at all- to the idiots. They really do just go away if you ignore them.

      --
      "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
  30. Re:AJAX by Phroggy · · Score: 3, Informative

    AJAX is simply DHTML (another acronym I never liked) that uses XMLHTTPRequest to query the server, instead of reloading the whole page. A great example of AJAX is Google Suggest - every time you type a letter in the search box, it retrieves a list of suggestions.

    XMLHTTP was originally created by Microsoft so they could use it for Outlook Web Access in Internet Explorer 5. Mozilla imitated it with the non-proprietary XMLHTTPRequest, which everyone else quickly adopted.

    --
    $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
    $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
  31. Re:"Cookie"? by MadMidnightBomber · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's spelled 'cookie' but it's pronounce 'Throat-warbler-mangrove'.

    --
    "It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
  32. China Daily by rob1980 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  33. A UK thing?!? It's Scandinavian.. by Savage-Rabbit · · Score: 4, Funny

    nd I've never heard blook or folksonomy -- must be a UK thing. Actually neither has anything to do with the UK or the internet; I don't know how those words even made that list?!? Folksonomy was the name of the town the town in Finland where Linus Torvalds was born, of course that was before they changed it to Linuxsonomisalmi in his honor (btw. you Americans always get the spelling wrong, in Finnish it's: Folksonomisalmi) . The place is a Mecca for Linux users everywhere. Blook, however, is a Swedish delicacy made from herring, pickled in vodka with reindeer lichen added for flavor. Cracking open a barrel of Blook is also an excellent way of fumigating your house since Blook emits strong alcoholic vapors laced with lichen essence for the first half hour or so after you open the barrel. Just don't light any matches or operate electric equipment while the fumes are dissipating due to the danger of triggering an explosion.
    --
    Only to idiots, are orders laws.
    -- Henning von Tresckow
  34. Standard jargon misunderstandings by Archtech · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Rather like the carbon and nitrogen cycles, there is a continuous process whereby experts in given domains coin new jargon terms. They do this because the terms are needed. Blog, folksonomy, and so on... all useful, meaningful, crisply denoting ideas that otherwise would have to be laboriously explained using several words (or even several sentences).

    People outside the charmed circle of that specific domain of expertise react in diverse ways. Most totally ignore the alien jargon - quite rightly, too. I don't worry about Chinese usage, for the simple reason that I don't live in China and don't speak any Chinese. In short, it's none of my business.

    Some others love to plunder specialist terms from other people's domains. IT is a classic case in point: think of all the words and phrases, from "interface" to "ping", "access", and "download", that have crept into everyday discourse. Like a jackdaw stealing shiny objects to decorate its nest, many people seem to feel that larding their conversation with these clever-sounding terms will gain them more respect. Of course, they usually misunderstand the jargon they borrow, and thus use it incorrectly. Often enough, this incorrect usage then becomes standard, by sheer weight of numbers.

    A third group react to other people's jargon by resenting and condemning it. They typically complain that the language is being polluted and degraded, failing to understand that the many sets of specialist jargon are like optional extensions to the basic language. As the waiter says in the old cartoon, "Eef you don' like heem, don' eat heem".

    --
    I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
  35. if it only were that by Moraelin · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  36. Re:Wired's Memes by funkify · · Score: 5, Funny

    Myself, I would have said "spread". There's really nothing wrong with short, simple, ancient, Anglo-Saxon words.

    Of course, that's a perfectly cromulent word.

  37. Web 2.0 is the most annoying term... by master_p · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...simply because it's a marketing term with no connection to technology.