Shamelessly lifted off IOL Technology:
“Blog”, “netiquette“, “cookie” and “wiki” have been voted among the most irritating words spawned by the Internet, according to the results of a poll.
Topping the list of words most likely to make web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard” was “folksonomy“, a term for a Web classification system.
“Blogosphere”, the collective name for blogs or online journals, was second; “blog” itself was third; “netiquette“, or Internet etiquette, came fourth and “blook“, a book based on a blog, was fifth. “Cookie”, a file sent to a user’s computer after they visit a website, came in ninth, while “wiki”, a collaborative website edited by its readers, was tenth.
British pollsters YouGov questioned 2091 adults earlier this month for the poll commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary award for books, which released the results in a statement.
Earlier this month, the growing use of words inspired by cyberspace was highlighted when the Collins English Dictionary announced that a string of them would be included in their ninth edition.
These included “me-media”, a term for personal content websites such as Facebook, and “godcast“, a religious service which has been converted to an MP3 format.
Although the full list of the “irritating” words are not to be found on the site mentioned, it does strike me a little unusual that the malformed “podcast” itself isn’t included, nor the verb “google”: how much more of a victory can anyone claim than people the world over using its name (a noun, as such) as a term that summarises the act of using an “internet search engine to look for information”, irrespective whether that search engine happens to be Yahoo, MSN, AOL, or Dogpile?
It should also be noted that the term “netiquette” long predates the web as we know it today, stretching back to the beginning of Usenet, FidoNet, and BBSs — which in itself should insight into the online experience of those who participated in the poll.
Now, why don’t you go print this post and xerox it for all your friends?
