Blog, folksonomy, wiki and other words coined by geeks and netizens are among the most irritating new "Weblish" words, according to a recent poll. Meanwhile, such words inspired by the Internet age are creeping into dictionaries, making them a more permanent chafe.
The poll -- conducted by the British site YouGov -- named folksonomy, a hybrid of "folks" and "taxonomy" that is defined as the web-classifying system by tagging key words, as the most irritating word, according to the MarketingProfs Daily Fix, via Marketing Charts. "Blogosphere" (the group name for blogs or online journals) came second, "blog" was ranked third, "netiquette" (or Internet etiquette) came fourth and "blook" (a book based on a blog) was fifth. "Wiki" (a collaborative, editable web site) was tenth.
The ranking was based on a poll of 2,091 Net users commissioned by the Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary award for blooks. This is the second year that the Lulu Blooker Prize has been handing out awards for words most likely to make Web users "wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard."
Earlier this month, lexicologists at the Collins English Dictionary, known as the dictionary most likely to accept new words, made the following entries official in the ninth edition: "file sharing," "Generation C" (people who create and publish Web content); "Godcast" (a religious service delivered in digital format); "Metaverse" (a 3D virtual world); and "Google bombing" (the practice of attempting to affect the ranking of Web sites provided by Google).
The two-year-old Lulu Blooker Prize was created by Bob Young, CEO of Lulu, a self-publishing site. Young says the tech revolution has ushered in a "new golden age for words, the greatest since Shakespeare's,"
Only ... not so fast. Jack Kapica, who blogs at the Globe and Mail, thinks there is "something unbearably smug about geeks who invent new words -- not that inventing words is a bad thing, it's just that in the tech world, the new words usually come freighted with more than just a definition."
Such words "usually come packaged with an entire sensibility, and are often used to create little fan clubs for the product, service or concept the words are meant to define," he writes. What's more, "They are also often used to exclude people who don't understand them."
Interestingly, I had planned to write about the new Weblish when I stumbled upon Kapica's post, presenting a funny little bit of BSP.
What? Don't know that BSP means? You will. Watch a dictionary near you, which I'll bet any day now will include it, too. (It's Blogger Sensory Perception.)