UK — The British are famous for their dry, wry wit – but 2,091 citizens of the green and pleasant land have had it up to here with seeing the queen’s English twisted by the internet.Words like “blog,” “netiquette,” “cookie,” and “wiki” are no joking matter to cyber slang hating citizens of Grand Britannia who participated in a YouGov poll on the subject.
Commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize literary book award, respondents made it clear that they weren’t amused by many words conceived and distributed on the internet and by its denizens. Adding fuel to their outrage may have been the fact that the Collins English Dictionary recently announced its intention to include a number of words custom designed to piss off purists in its ninth edition.
While “wiki” came in a respectable – or is that disrespectable – 10th place among the most hated words, “cookie” clocked in a number nine position. Although a complete list of words is not immediately available on the website, media sources fill in the blanks by citing blog books called “blooks” as the fifth most hated word, with “netiquette” as fourth, “blog” as third, and “blogosphere” as the second most infuriating made-up word.
At the top of the list that made most participants “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on they keyboard” was “folksonomy,” – a word referring to a web classification system.
Also on the list was “me-media,” which relates to social networking sites – and “godcast,” one of many words that can be used to describe religious programming in MP3 format.
