Jun 23 2007

Words Which Annoy

Category: PersonalChrisM @ 10:22 am

Recently, a poll that has been published by a research group (YouGov) in Britain, has announced that podcast, blog, and wiki are amongst the most frustrating words to have emerged from the Internet!

A lot of these words leave me wondering just why they apparently annoy so many, however, number #2 on the list is blogosphere, which I find is particularly over used, so perhaps it is just that different people have different triggers? Next in the list were blog and netiquette neither of which leave me shaking with frustration, so I am beginning to wonder just how many of the 2000 odd people surveyed chose the top 5 in their list, or whether there were so many contenders for the competition, word-wise, that any one particular word or phrase could score highly, in terms of annoyance, with a relatively small number of votes. If anyone has found the raw figures for this sort of data, please do leave a comment…

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4 Responses to “Words Which Annoy”

  1. WLB says:

    Interesting to know who they surveyed too. If they surveyed pensioners who have no idea what these words mean and get annoyed hearing them o the evening news, that would explain a lot thing.
    Netiquette gets to me because it implies that politeness is different online than in real life.

  2. betshopboy says:

    How words or terms can be fristrating really puzzles me.
    If podcast is frustrating, then I can easily imagine how
    “vodcast” will get onto people’s nerve, it did to mine!

    Netiquette is another word I dislike, i don’t feel
    frustrated by it, just don’t like the sound of it!

  3. Oleg Frantsuzov says:

    ‘Wiki’ is completely okay for me. ‘Blog’ sometimes causes problems when talking in Russian, because in sounds like ‘block’ due to Russian pronounciation rules. And ‘podcast’ is the word I truly hate. The problem for me, as a native Russian speaker, is that there are a lot of Russian ‘pod’-words (‘pod’ in Russian is a prefix which means ‘sub’, like ‘subclass’ == ‘podklass’). So this linguistic bastard, the word ‘podcast’, sounds like ‘subcast’ to me.

  4. Chris Merriman says:

    >>WLB – netiquette. I would say this is more of an abbreviation than just a new term, in the same way that no one bothers to say weB LOG any more, I guess people got bored of saying interNET ETIQUETTE . Plus, there really a lot more nuances to online politeness really, often related to the complications that using text as a method of communications inherently brings with it.

    >>BetShopBoy, ta for your comments, appreciated.

    >>Oleg, once Russians create their own internet based terminology, that catches on, you will be able to avoid having words that cause so much confusion. Good luck in getting English speakers to use the terms though, I think that may require a lot of luck/planning/media connections 😉