LAST week Johnson picked his Word of the Year for 2013. And now that the holiday guests are gone and the house is finally clean again, it’s time to look at the mess left behind, and do a little sorting of the lexicon.

People rather like end-of-the-year “Worst Words” columns, it seems. Timothy Egan chipped in “Words for the Dumpster” in the New York Times on December 28th. There are 1,123 comments, nearly all nominating the commenter’s own least-favourite words. At the bottom of this present column are the first few hundred of them. Memorise them, strike them from your vocabulary, and then read on.

Now we can turn to a bit of analysis of what annoys people.

Pause-fillers. Huge numbers of people nominated like for banishment. Young people, in particular, pepper their language with this. But the educated use a lot of content-free filler, too. A number of the Times’scommenters voted to ban…Continue reading

from Prospero http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2014/01/bad-words?fsrc=rss
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