Friday, June 22, 2007

The most hated Internet words

I found this article rather amusing, though I wonder exactly why those particular words were deemed so irritating since they don't bother me personally. Is it their sound, their ubiquity, or the fact that several of them are amalgams of other words? (Note that it was a British poll; I somehow think of Brits as more protective of the English language's "purity".) The words that I find most annoying are those that I consider inelegant and/or overused, such as "proactive" and "concertize". As for Internet-created vocabulary, by far the most irritating word in my book---if it can even be considered a word---is "lol", when it's not treated as the interjection and acronym that it is. A simple "LOL!" in response to a joke is fine, but "...and then I walked into a wall lol!" drives me crazy. How do you even say that out loud?

1 comment:

CT said...

I think people have been pronouncing 'lol' like 'lull'. So the sentence would be read aloud as "...and then I walked into a wall, lull!"

'LOL' has even spawned off a noun, 'lulz'. People refer to 'the lulz' or 'teh lulz' when something someone said or did on the Internet is likely to cause much (usually derisive) laughter.

Attempting phonetic pronunciations of Internet acronyms has spawned other internet terms like 'lollerskates', 'roflcopter', etc.

That was probably more than you wanted to know about the state of English on the Internet, I'm guessing (the stupid, it burns!).