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Top Searches of 2003, A Dave Odyssey, Banned Words for 2004 331

Posted by simoniker from the year-plus-plus dept.
Shockmaster writes "Yahoo! has released their top searches of 2003. Google also has a year-end Zeitgeist wrap-up for popular search queries." Elsewhere, TheFairElf writes "The Miami Herald has Dave Barry's annual roundup of the year's main events titled 2003: A Dave Odyssey. The most significant events include the release of the fifth Harry Potter book 'Harry Potter Reaches Puberty and Starts Taking Really Long Showers' and the discovery of large quantities of sugar in Iraq which the CIA claimed 'is a leading cause of tooth decay'." Finally, wideangle writes "'Calling all metrosexuals: Get rid of that bling-bling - or at least find another word for it. In its annual compilation of language irritants, Lake Superior State University singled out 17 words and phrases that it says ought to be banned as overused, trite, euphemistic or just plain inaccurate." LOL, we wish everyone an Xtreme New Year from Slashdot, OMG.
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Top Searches of 2003, A Dave Odyssey, Banned Words for 2004 More

Top Searches of 2003, A Dave Odyssey, Banned Words for 2004

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  • unneeded words (Score:5, Funny)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @12:49AM (#7851089) Homepage
    Heck, "metrosexual" isn't even needed. The English language has several words already to express this exact concept. Among them:

    fop: A man who is preoccupied with and often vain about his clothes and manners.

    dandy: A man who affects extreme elegance in clothes and manners.

    dapper: a. Neatly dressed; trim. b. Very stylish in dress.

    gentleman: A well-mannered and elegant man with high standards of proper behavior.

    I can go on...there are others. But come on, pretending the reemergence of the gentleman fop is something new is just retarded. Jumping on the bandwagon of some writer's column...yuk. Might as well start incorporating slogans from WWE into your daily speech, it's the same concept.

    • Re:unneeded words (Score:2, Informative)

      by Joe Tie. ( 567096 )
      As I understand it though, the term metrosexual specifficaly says the person isn't gay, which none of the others do. Both fop and dandy have strong gay implications, at least in their common usage. It's less about specifics of dress and more about fitting the sterotype of being gay presented by the general media while actually being straight.
    • An admirable list, but I don't think it really describes the metrosexual. Dandy has too much of a homosexual connotation. Dapper can't be used in a derogatory way, neither can gentleman. Metrosexual tends to be used negatively. Fop could concievably be used, but I don't think it really reflects the ethos of the metrosexual. It seems to narrow.

      At any rate the only problem I have with the term is its deragatory nature. Where's the brotherly love? It's kinda pathetic when we have to use such silly social divi
    • "A lot" is two words. You wouldn't say "alittle", would you?


      My god, a grammer Nazi. How can you stand to read slashdot?

    • "Metrosexual" is a marketing term, intended to encourage shopping.

      There's a delightful interview with Georgio Armani in the Economist a few weeks back that touches on this. He points out how hip-hop, unlike rock, induces young people to spend money on decorative objects and clothes.

      I'd wondered why a played-out genre was so heavily promoted. Now I know.

  • The actual list. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Worldly Iconoclast ( 724498 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @12:54AM (#7851102)
    Seems they must have edited it to make it politically correct. I'm betting these are the real ones:

    Top ten Jennifer Searches:
    1. Jennifer Lopez naked
    2. Jennifer Aniston naked
    3. Jennifer Garner naked
    4. Jennifer Love Hewitt naked
    5. Jennifer Connelly naked
    6. Jennifer Ellison naked
    7. Jennifer Tilly naked
    8. Jennifer Esposito naked
    9. Jennifer Capriati naked
    10. Jennifer O'Dell naked

    Top ten movies:
    1. Harry Potter slash fiction
    2. Matrix download divx
    3. Lord of the Rings download
    4. Star Wars dvd download divx
    5. X-Men hentai
    6. Spiderman fanfic
    7. Finding Nemo download
    8. Hulk download .avi edonkey2000
    9. Matrix Reloaded download
    10. The Ring download edonkey

    The internet is a sad place.

  • expressions I hate (Score:3, Interesting)

    by renehollan ( 138013 ) <[rhollan] [at] [clearwire.net]> on Thursday January 01, 2004 @12:56AM (#7851111) Homepage Journal
    "for all intensive purposes" - It's "for all intents and purposes", dipwad.

    "quote... unquote". There is no such thing as "unquote" -- it's "end quote". Using "quote unquote" as a prefix to the purported quote is doubly irritating.

    "It's like this...." I don't give a blinking fuck what it's like, I want to know what it is.

    People who mess up the meanings of precision and accuracy tick me off. 165.04452 +/= 50 is precise, but not very accurate. Abuse of significant digits is another irritant.

    • Re:expressions I hate (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jrockway ( 229604 ) <jon-nospam@jrock.us> on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:10AM (#7851157) Homepage Journal
      I agree with you, especially with the "intensive purposes". I think people say that because they can see a purpose as being intensive, while they cannot see intents and purposes. Actually, they probably have never read anything other than an online forum, so they haven't picked up any language idioms. I often read my friends' papers and they read like an online forum... if you're in an online forum, write like it (like I'm doing now) but otherwise, DON'T! I'm worried that good writing will be shunned by my generation (like dude, whoa, that's a big word. is that on the SAT?).
      • I agree with you, especially with the "intensive purposes". I think people say that because they can see a purpose as being intensive, while they cannot see intents and purposes.

        I think it's a case of people hearing a phrase but never seeing it in print. They know what it means, but can't spell it out. Pretty common, knowwhatImean? ;)
        • ...if they did, they would spell it correctly.

          Just because they spell out a homonym, dosen't mean they knew it and just made a typographical error. I fail to see how anyone who knows the meaning of the phrase "intents and purposes" could mistype it as "intensive purposes". These are completely different sets of words.

          Another one that I find very irritating is ignorance of the difference between 'Affect' and 'Effect'. However, this one-character substitution might enjoy the benefit of the doubt, if thei
          • I think it's a case of people hearing a phrase but never seeing it in print. They know what it means, but can't spell it out. ...if they did, they would spell it correctly.

            I disagree. The meaning of an unknown phrase can be taken from the context in which it is used, not the actual words. You know the phrase "it's just an expression". Expressions often can't be taken literally, so I don't find it hard to believe that the person would just accept the expression's meaning without analyzing the individual
            • Sorry for all the bold type... forgot the /b tag.
            • I completely agree that it would be VERY boring if everyone spoke like lawyers in contracts, and I'm certainly not expecting that (ugh).

              In this example, the question is whether the people making this error ("intents and purposes" typed as "intensive purposes") actually know the meaning of the phrase.

              This significant an error is not merely a typo, but an indication that the person knows nothing more than a string of syllables, which they are MIS-assembling into the wrong words. They are unthinkingly parro
              • I think "for all intents and purposes" has become something of a fixed expression. Sure, it's made up of individual words, but it's meaning is no longer really bound to those words. It's gained a meaning of its own. As such, a lot of people who have never seen the expression in print end up mispelling it.

                Are they "unthinkingly parroting" this string of syllables? Perhaps. But you have to keep in mind, that's how language works. People repeat a given series of syllables to convey a given meaning. Whether t

                • ...as long as the data is only mangled within the capibility of the error-recovery system to reconstruct it, there is no error.

                  This is true in some limited contexts, where the ECC works and you only care about the current result, not the robustness of the system. But, it is merely pedantic to distinguish between a correct data transmission and an erroneous data transmission that was corrected.

                  It definitely matters to people who are not already familiar with the phrase, and especially to non-native speake
      • I agree with you, especially with the "intensive purposes". I think people say that because they can see a purpose as being intensive, while they cannot see intents and purposes.

        Actually, I think the "intensive purposes" thing started off by somebody hearing somebody say "intents and purposes" with a slur/lisp or some other distortion (crappy telephone?), and then the other person picked it up as "intensive purposes" and started using it. I feel the same way about people who write "of" when they mean "ha
        • I used to say "intensive purposes" for exactly that reason. I heard it somewhere (I guess mis-heard is a better description) and used the wrong phrase for years. It was less than two years ago that I read the phrase, and learned what a mistake I had been making.

          Oops.

          At least I now know better.

          The one that bugs me is "Could care less" - no, you could not care less - that's the point: your amount of 'care' is at zero, and you cannot go lower....

          Did I mention that for all intents and purposes, the North Ko

          • Yup. How about "lowest common denominator". If you think about that, it's always one. All numbers share 1 as a common denominator. Maybe people mean "least common multiple" or "greatest common denominator". Number theory should be part of grade school math, methinks :)
            • Yup. How about "lowest common denominator". If you think about that, it's always one. All numbers share 1 as a common denominator. Maybe people mean "least common multiple" or "greatest common denominator". Number theory should be part of grade school math, methinks :)

              That one used to bother me, till I had it pointed out that to "aim for the lowest common denominator" is (for example) exactly what many businesses do. The ideal product or service is one which is the equivalent of "1", as it appeals equally

          • Who else hear thought that there were two words:

            Rondeyvo and rendezves (phonetic spelling)?

            If you only read and never correlate the spelling with the pronunciation, you can be very confused.

            Horse devours.
      • What he said. Also, mispelling is common amongst those who don't read.

        Regarding overused words or terms, how many times in the past month have you heard/read the phrase, "at risk"?

      • Re:expressions I hate (Score:5, Funny)

        by Nugget ( 7382 ) * on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:44AM (#7851255) Homepage
        Such errors [slacker.com] are pardon parcel with people who learn the language through speech and not through reading. I could of made that same mistake had I not encountered the phrase in print before hearing it. Sadly, people who don't read just can't cut the muster. I'd just assume watch a movie instead of read a book.
        • Sadly, people who don't read just can't cut the muster.

          Funny you should mention this one, as "cut the muster" is actually the correct usage. It became "cut the mustard" because people heard the expression and didn't know what a "muster" was. A muster is the calling out of the militia. To not "cut the muster" would be to be sent home as unfit to serve due to age, infirmity, etc.

          • Christ dude, there were no less than four such mistakes in the post. Duh, that was his point. That's why it's modded funny. If "cut the muster" is the only one that you noticed, perhaps you need to go read it again.
      • The best and worst part of English is, as someone on /. pointed out one day, that you can glork the meaning of a word from its context.

        I have gripes about the usage about certain parts of the language (I am drunk but I think I got the its/it's part right) but we have to keep in mind that the language (and more specifically, the way we use the language) evolves at an incredible rate.

        It's (!) like the whole me/I argument. Me and my friend, versus my friend and I. At some point we must draw a line betw

      • Re:expressions I hate (Score:3, Informative)

        by iantri ( 687643 )
        Un-fucking-believable. I've never seen anyone write "intensive purposes" before, only "intents and purposes", but apparently the former is more common. [googlefight.com]
    • You know what ticks me off more than people who mess up the meanings of precision and accuracy? People who mess then up but think they're right. If you make a measurement of 165.04452 +/- 50 (say, for example, meters of depth), it (the measurement) is not precise at all. Whether it is accurate or not depends on the actual value of the depth being measured.

      To summarize, if the true depth was 165 m:

      165.04452 +/- 50 --> not precise, accurate
      165.04452 +/- .0005 --> precise, accurate
      100 +/- 50 -->
    • Duuuude...duh!

      For all the non-intensive purposes, you do something else!

      Sheesh.
    • I fully agree. Here are some more in the same vein:

      "case and point" - is that like* when a thief checks out a potential house to burgle and then gestures towards it with an index finger?

      "the point is mute" - the point may be moot, but it is never "mute," unless maybe it is being made by a mime.

      using "that begs the question" to mean "your statement prompts me to ask this question" instead of its real meaning.

      * =P

    • Let's make it a peeve party!

      "Whereabouts" when the speaker meant "where".

      "to be like" instead of "said" - "She's like, where's my metrosexual extreme bling-bling?"

      ...laura who wonders if she's just getting old

    • Using "quote unquote" as a prefix to the purported quote is doubly irritating.

      Don't forget the usual dain-bramaged hand choreography.

      The world would be measurably better if people would say "so called" instead of "quote unquote". Even, "And then he used the quote facilities unquote to puke out his drunken little guts."

      Some of my personal peeves:

      • "Tough road to hoe" (row to hoe)
      • "I just assume do [something]" (I'd just as soon ...).
      • "I wasn't doing anying imparticular" (in particular)
      • "And
    • Abuse of significant digits is another irritant.

      Oh, I dunno about that - quite often I like grabbing a digit from around the thirtieth decimal of PI and beating it around the head and shoulders with a large red herring for an hour or so.

      Much better than pulling a gun in the midst of road-rage later in the day.

    • Re:expressions I hate (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Varitek ( 210013 )
      There is no such thing as "unquote" -- it's "end quote".

      Tell you what I hate, it's people who believe that only their knowledge and experiences are valid. "Quote Unquote" is perfectly valid in the UK, at least. There's even a BBC radio show [bbc.co.uk] called that.
    • My aunt is a professional attorney and she says, "I could care less" when she really means, "I couldn't care less."

      Hooray for legalese?
    • "It's like this...."

      One of my bosses used to start his every speach on every meeting by: Well... you know... I mean... It's like this.... The rest of hiw speach was usually much cleaner and even articulated, but the introductionary phrase was irritating, especially being so persistent.

      By the way, it was irritating for us ESL-immigrants. Americans used to talk in a similar way and did not found anything wrong in using so many parasite-phrases.

    • add- array- everything is an array of services these days... an array this and an array that best practices- how did all this consulting jargon make its way into normal business-speak

  • OMFG ROFLMAO (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jrockway ( 229604 ) <jon-nospam@jrock.us> on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:00AM (#7851121) Homepage Journal
    Actually, I don't think lol is such a bad expression. To me, it means something like "heh" or more like breathing out and saying "is that right?"* in real life. Since you can't express those emotions in words, we made one for use online. OTOH, people misuse lol and say it after everything. That in and of itself is not bad, if there's a funny conversation it seems right to use lol instead of a smiley. I liked smileys back when they weren't turned into gay (sorry, that's a word that needs to go) yellow things. So lol stays as text and works out better.

    In summary, replace "LOL" with "gay" as an adjective. That would be better.

    Also, anyone who says "bling-bling" is going to be shot by me. And anyone who writes in the passive voice.

    Wow, the first time a grammar nazi-like post has been on topic. I'll go now :) [lol, heh, rofl]

    --
    * Actually, 'lol ok' == 'is that right?' IMO. My friends and I have shortened that to lok, which is more efficient (save on bandwidth, my friends) than 'is that right?'
    • > In summary, replace "LOL" with "gay" as an adjective. That would be better.

      I mean delete LOL from the list and add gay. Although the other way could work too :)
    • When I was at university, a friend of mine dated a younger girl who used "lol" (pronounced "lawl") in verbal conversation. That was too weird.

      She ended up getting hooked on crack, then tried to assault her mom and ran away to live in the ghetto though, so maybe it was just some kind of statistical abberation.
    • Actually, lol isn't to you thought to be such a bad expression. To you, it is understood as something like "heh" or more like "is that right?"* being breathed out and said in real life. Since those emotions cannot be expressed in words, one was made up for use online. OTOH, lol is misused and is said after everything. That in and of itself is not bad, if a funny conversation is being undertaken it seems right for lol to be used instead of a smiley. Smileys were liked by me back when they weren't turned into
  • 1. letizia ortiz

    2. terra

    3. gran hermano

    Curious... They have trouble finding the Earth?
  • LOL and other abbreviated 'e-mail speak,' including the symbol '@' when used in advertising and elsewhere - Alex G. of Warsaw, Poland, says, "It's everywhere on the net! OMG! u r chattin to sum1 then...lol this and lol that....Get it away!" "I wonder if anyone really laughs out loud when they use this short-hand Instant Messenger slang?" Rachel Rose, Pickford, Michigan.

    Yay! I was waiting for this day.

    Thank god I killed my MSN account a few weeks ago and only use Jabber now. MSN is for people who can't le
    • Yeah, you're right. I can tolerate (and even use) lol and rofl and the like (IIRC RTFM IANAL IMHO). But when someone says "u r chattin to [WITH!] sum1 and ur comp is like whoa dude" I draw the line. U, R, chattin (add the fucking g. it's one letter!), etc. make me MAD. 1 is not the same as one (it can be, but one must not confuse 'one thing' with 'someone'). UR is NOT how you spell your.

      I can see people abbreivating things like i18n to avoid typing internationalization. But typing u to save yourself
      • I can see people abbreivating things like i18n to avoid typing internationalization. But typing u to save yourself the two keystrokes seems lazy and uneducated. Anybody else agree?

        Yeah, I agree. The people who say 'u' when they mean 'you' must be so bad at typing that the 2 letters makes an appreciable difference in their speed. It's really sad.
  • This is surely one of the signs of the Apocalypse...
    • I thought the top seach was for Kazaa. Yep, it's number one.

      Nice work RIAA. By threatening 12 year old girls in housing projects, granmothers and other people who had no clue, you have spread the good news of music sharing far and wide. Only a such a large and well funded organization could create such great advertising. Keep it up.

  • Calling terms like "metrosexual" or "bling bling" irritating is silly. Language is a living, evolving thing. Lexicographers develop dictionaries by accumulating samples of speech in the real world. Words come and go. Sure, one could say "fop," but it would sound archaic to most of us.

  • An omission... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gmaestro ( 316742 ) <jason.guidry@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:10AM (#7851155)
    Might I add the word "schizophrenic" to the list? It seems anyone that uses this word in everyday speech has no idea what it means. The analogy they are often going for is with multiple-personality or bi-polar disorder.

    Oh well, as long as we're griping about the misuse of language...

  • An organization that purports to be able to tell us whether they're useful or not. I'll grant you that "sweat like a pig" certainly implies something inaccurate, but a lot of people like me actually know this about pigs and use the term anyway because it's an interesting turn of phrase. (How hard do you have to be working to be a pig and be sweaty?) Let's look at some others:

    Metrosexual? Bling-Bling? Well, I would never use them in a sentence, but if some people find one of them useful, then let them

  • The Netherlands (Score:3, Funny)

    by CSharpMinor ( 610476 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:19AM (#7851180)
    Note that the most popular film search on Google for the Netherlands wasn't LOTR, the Matrix, or Finding Nemo; it was 2 Fast 2 Furious.

  • OMFG... (Score:5, Funny)

    by EmagGeek ( 574360 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:20AM (#7851183) Journal
    IANAL, but IMNSHO, TLAs and other MIAs should not be banned. After I RTFA, I was ROFLMAO at the proposition that these quips have no place in the lexicon... YMMV, of course, and of course YAETYOO...

  • You idiots. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by YOU LIKEWISE FAIL IT ( 651184 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:27AM (#7851200) Homepage Journal
    X-files, Xtreme, Windows XP and X-Box are all part of this PR-powered phenomenon," said John Casnig of Kingston, Ontario.

    The X-Files debuted in 1993, well ahead of the "PR-powered phenomonon" ( Phenomenon - now there's an overused word ) of using X in product branding. The X in "X-Games", "X-Box", "X-Wife" refers to 'extreme' ( which, yes, is a trite marketing cliche ). The X in "X-Files" is supposed to connote ideas of mystery or of an unknown quantity.

    And of course, there's the following explanation, given in Season 5's Travelers:

    Dales: X-Files?

    Dorothy: Yes. Unsolved cases. I file them under 'X'.
    Dales: Why don't you file them under 'U'... for Unsolved?
    Dorothy: That's what I did until I ran out of room. Plenty of room in the 'X's.

    Plenty of room in the 'X's indeed. Happy new year everyone.

    YLFI

    • XXX (Score:2)

      by twitter ( 104583 )
      X-Ray, turn of the 19th century. X used as a marker for experimental craft, 50 years ago? X Windowing system, 1993, thank you MIT Athena. There was plenty of room in the Xs.

      Then came Microsoft, with billions of dollars in advertising money. ActiveX, Xbox, the whole fucking eXPerience, blasted at giga dolar levels. They plastered it everywhere, in the Wintel pulp pages, on TV, on billboards even four page fold outs in National Geographic next to bullshit about "green" enviornmentally friendly NiCad bat

      • I believe for Russian geeks "Windows XP" actually was meaningful - XP - hooi poimesh'.
        It is like (loosely translated) "Windows: f.ck-you-if-you-understand-it".

  • The REAL number one search... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:30AM (#7851204)
    The REAL number one search of 2003 was for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, wasn't it?
  • Exchange LOL for "overlord".

  • Lone Gunman time (Score:3, Funny)

    by frankmu ( 68782 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:38AM (#7851236) Homepage
    dammit! don't tell us it's the new year yet!

    think about us in the pacific time zone!

    you bastards!

  • Yeah, right. (Score:3, Funny)

    by sparklingfruit ( 736978 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:42AM (#7851251)
    1. KaZaA
    2. Harry Potter
    3. American Idol
    4. Britney Spears
    5. 50 Cent
    6. Eminem
    7. WWE
    8. Paris Hilton 9. NASCAR
    10. Christina Aguilera

    I wonder which ones Yahoo were paid to feature in that "top 10" and which one made the real top 10.

    I thought the #1 search has always been "Sex".

    • Re:Yeah, right. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Lawrence_Bird ( 67278 )
      I agree they seem suspicious, perhaps putting Kazaa at #1
      was an effort to look legit? In any event looking at the
      rest of the page just confirms the decline of the internet
      into the abyss.

  • "Shots rang out" (Score:5, Funny)

    by ElJefe ( 41718 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @01:51AM (#7851272)
    On a related note, why are explosions always rocking, e.g., "Explosions rock Baghdad"? Why don't they ever roll?
  • As I see it right now, Google's Zeitgeist says: (my emphasis)
    The annual
    Wimbledon tennis tournament takes place at Roland Garros in Paris each spring.

    How is it that the Harry Potter is second only to Britney Spears on the popular queries list and also below the Simpsons on the fictional characters list?

  • Last I researched it it appeared to have been coined by Deep Throat during the Watergate scandal and means something rather more than "hard evidence." Fingerprints at the scene are hard evidence. If you have a smoking gun you don't need no stinking fingerprints.

    Yes, shots really do ring out.

    "Harm's way is actually in the dictionary."

    Embedded journalist may be a new term but a concept that goes back at least until WWII. It has real and important meaning which is not "at the scene." It may be overused now,
  • I resolve to pay my Linux fee to SCO. But then again I am drunk right now and might start using FreeBSD. Who cares if it is dead and all, they got a depeguinator which sounds pretty cool at this point in inebriation.

  • Banned Word Nomination (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:29AM (#7851368) Homepage Journal

    Normally, bad grammar and malformed words just roll off me. But for some reason this one really gets my back up:

    "Incentivize"

    The verb form of "incentive", presumably intended to mean, "to provide incentives for," which is another way of saying 'encourage' or 'influence'.

    ...Except that "incentive" is itself the noun form of the verb "incent", which means to encourage or influence. So you could use an actual word, save five letters, and not look like a pretentious twit.

    Don't get me started...

    Schwab

  • Doing my part (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vilim ( 615798 ) <ryanNO@SPAMjabberwock.ca> on Thursday January 01, 2004 @02:32AM (#7851373) Homepage
    The LOL ROFL ROFLMAO ROFLMGDMFAO and the like, along with stupid abbreviations used to obscure the point of a conversation (my theory is that it is a vain attempt to make the recipient believe the sender is more intelligent than they really are by obscuring thier point in a stream of unintelligable ASCII) has been on my list for a very long time. I generally ban anyone on any of my IM lists that attempt to talk to me like that and tell them I will unban them when they learn thier lesson and promise never to do that again.

    Another popular tactic is to use the poor excuse for an MSN client I wrote a few years back to send them "OMG j00 sh00d 5t0p yoozing 5TVp1D T/\1| LOL!!!!!11111!!!" followed by a bunch of smileys in a very long for loop. It makes a windows 98 machine slow to a crawl suprisingly quickly.

    Just doing my part to rid the world of idiots
  • DVD-R was one of the top terms. Not DVD+R....
  • .. the extent of acronyms these days. A typical sentence uttered by a 13 year old on a Counter-Strike server might look like this:

    wtf omfg ffs nfw tbh bs h4x ban plskthx

    There's a clear solution to this problem: Ban 13 year olds. Actually, you'd need to take out quite a few other ages as well, but that would be a good start.


  • a recent 232 articles' thread on usenet's misc.writing and rec.arts.comics.strips had the "Subject: what are the most annoying cliches" [google.com]...

  • ... but not "shnazizle fazzizle buzizzle" ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kaltkalt ( 620110 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @04:49AM (#7851724)
    How could that "fizzle in my snizzle" (or whatever the whole -izzle thing is) be left off? I'll concede I have no clue what it supposedly means, but I assume it means or refers to something. Once it got used in an Old Navy commercial, that was the final straw with me.

  • "place stamp here" (Score:3, Informative)

    by rabidcow ( 209019 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @05:22AM (#7851784) Homepage
    There is a reason that they put "place stamp here" on envelopes, and it's not because they think you don't know where it goes. This is to reinforce that they won't recieve mail "postage due," to draw a contrast to the envelopes that say "postage will be paid by the addressee" in the same place. (what, has everyone forgotten those?)

    Basically it cuts down on the costs that the post office has to pay making it very clear to everyone that the addressee will NOT be paying for it. Otherwise they may have to get it halfway across the country before throwing it out.
  • Patent lawsuit is what I'd really love to NOT see again. . .
  • I was looking over the lists of most popular 2003 search requests for Yahoo and Google, and there weren't any real major surprises there, with one exception. Britney Spears is still pretty high on both lists (#1 for Google, #4 for Yahoo), and I was under the impression that she was already out the door and way down the block.

    Which got me to wondering... how honest are these lists? We've read a lot of stories about the great pains Google goes through to score web pages so that a search request will retur
  • None appear to have made the list this year (or in previous), but I can't be the only one who can't stand people saying "My bad!" The real kicker is that those same people are usually the ones who belt out "It's all good!" Make up your bloody mind!

  • LSSU (Score:3, Funny)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 ) * <treboreel@live.com> on Thursday January 01, 2004 @08:53AM (#7852163) Journal
    Lake Superior State U, wow that is obviously a place of higher learning, with serious subjects and weighty discussion occupying large amounts of the industrious, academically driven students. Then again maybe the sit around and talk about useless inane B$. You be the judge. I would have expected to see reality TV there, afterall we know the networks just plain CAN'T NOT script everything down to the slightest audience chuckle, just ask Ozzy :)
  • I cannot believe that Google, in their review of the year, made such a huge error as the following:

    "The annual Wimbledon tennis tournament takes place at Roland Garros in Paris each spring."

    Umm, folks, the Wimbledon tennis tournament takes place at *Wimbledon* in England. The *French Open* Tennis Tournament is what takes place at Roland Garros in Paris.

    Next they'll be saying that the American Open tennis tournament takes place in London, and the Australian Open in New York.

  • The Out/In List (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PizzaFace ( 593587 ) on Thursday January 01, 2004 @12:51PM (#7852980)
    It's not the new year without the Washington Posts's annual list of what's out and what's in [washingtonpost.com] for 2004.

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