Words // Current

The Agency of Albert

Albert's speech -the worthy cult-

remanns
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11 days ago
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3 comments

Spammers Be Warned…We Bloggers Will Be Fighting Back

Stalking bloggers on their sites in unacceptable and illegal. The blogosphere’s... more

jrn
added this
16 days ago
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0 comments

How To Speak In Japanese Without Knowing The Words.

Rainbowhill goes over how to sound fluent in Japanese while not really knowing the... more

TurningOtaku
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18 days ago
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0 comments

Hot Lettering, Font And Word Tattoo Designs - Cool ideas for finding great word and ltierary tattoo dseigns and ideas.

HEre is a great article featuring some of the most popular tattoo fonts for lettering... more

limbush349
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22 days ago
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0 comments

'Whatever' Tops List of Most Annoying Words

"So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of "whatever" in conversations.

The popular slacker term of indifference was found "most annoying in conversation" by 47 percent of Americans surveyed in a Marist College poll released Wednesday.

"Whatever" easily beat out "you know," which especially grated a quarter of respondents. The other annoying contenders were "anyway" (at 7 percent), "it is what it is" (11 percent) and "at the end of the day" (2 percent).

"Whatever" -- pronounced "WHAT'-ehv-errr" when exasperated -- is an expression with staying power. Immortalized in song by Nirvana ("oh well, whatever, nevermind") in 1991, popularized by the Valley girls in "Clueless" later that decade, it is still commonly used, often by younger people.

It can be an all-purpose argument-ender or a signal of apathy. And it can really be annoying. The poll found "whatever" to be consistently disliked by Americans regardless of their race, gender, age, income or where they live.

"It doesn't surprise me because 'whatever' is in a special class, probably," said Michael Adams, author of "Slang: The People's Poetry" and an associate professor of English at Indiana University. "It's a word that -- and it depends how a speaker uses it -- can suggest dismissiveness."

Adams, who was not involved in the poll and is not annoyed by "whatever," points out that its use is not always negative. It also can be used in place of other, neutral phrases that have fallen out of favor, like "six of one, half dozen of the other," he said.

But the negative connotation might explain why "whatever" was judged more annoying than the ever-popular "you know," which was recently given a public workout by Caroline Kennedy during her flirtation with the New York U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton. "You know," Adams notes, is a way for speakers to seek assent from others.

Pollsters at the Poughkeepsie, N.Y. college surveyed 938 U.S. adults by telephone Aug. 3 - Aug 6. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points. The five choices included were chosen by people at the poll discussing what popular words and phrases might be considered especially annoying, said spokeswoman Mary Azzoli.""So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of... more

St_Alia_10191
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1 month ago
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11 comments

Six Word Stories

an example of a 6 words story Human genome patented. Sex considered piracy.

franksalot
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1 month ago
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1 comment

Whatever: the most annoying word

Whatever has been voted the most annoying word in American English, winning out over... more

emmaboswood
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1 month ago
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6 comments

E-TARD The LifeCaster - outside on his Laptop

This is after I got my Laptop working with Flash, for a long time it would not work... more

ETARD
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1 month ago
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1 comment

Great words

We need more of these words

franksalot
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1 month ago
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0 comments

Geist

The magazine and Ideas and Culture Read it. it will make you smarter and more... more

franksalot
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1 month ago
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0 comments

A NON FICTION POST MODERN MOMENT- The Writing Of David Albahari

If you are a writer or interested in becoming one, you don't want to miss this... more

franksalot
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1 month ago
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0 comments

Columnist disapproves of increased use of the word "retard"

In an editorial piece, Calgary Sun columnist Michael Platt argues against use of the... more

PsychoAlan
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3 months ago
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0 comments

Matrix Codes in SMS

These matrix codes are new language or Short Message Service (SMS) that created by the... more

CHANLEEPENG
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3 months ago
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0 comments

USA vs. USSR for .eco domain supremacy

The United States crosses sabers with Russia again, not in the name of nukes, but for... more

Greenpointer
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3 months ago
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2 comments

The 50 Most Beautiful English Words

Here are some of the results of the most beautiful English words, as voted for by... more

CHANLEEPENG
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3 months ago
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United Kingdom Talk Video Tuesday 11th August 2009

Tuesday's edition of my three times a week talk show.Watch the show here on CURRENT TV... more

ChrisReardon
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3 months ago
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Can Flarf Ever Be Taken Seriously? (And PS, what is it?)

"Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which poets prowl the Internet using random word searches, e-mail the bizarre results to one another, then distill the newly found phrases into poems that are often as disturbing as they are hilarious—is showing signs of having cleared a spot among the ranks of legitimate art forms. Despite the group's penchant for shocking content and outrageous titles (Sharon Mesmer's "Annoying Diabetic Bitch," for example, or Gary Sullivan's "Grandmother's Explosive Diarrhea"), many in the literary world are taking the poems seriously.

So far, at least sixteen books of Flarf have been published—a flurry of them just in the past several years. Since 2006, the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan has held an annual three-day Flarf Festival that features poetry as well as "flarfy" music, theater, and film. Last September a group of Flarf poets were invited to read at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In April, New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art hosted its own Flarf reading. And in November, Washington, D.C.–based independent publisher Edge Books will release a four-hundred-page anthology, Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, featuring the work of twenty-five to thirty poets.

The seed for Flarf was planted in New York City in 2000, soon after poet Gary Sullivan learned that his dying grandfather had been scammed by the International Library of Poetry, the now-defunct organization that purported to hold poetry contests, yet accepted every poem it received, asking "winners" to pay fifty dollars for a copy of an anthology featuring their poem. As a prank, Sullivan submitted the worst poem he could write. The poem, titled "Mm-hmm," began: "Yeah, mm-hmm, it's true / big birds make / big doo! I got fire inside / my ‘huppa'-chimp(TM) / gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god / wanna DOOT! DOOT! / Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey!"

After receiving the obligatory embossed letter telling him he'd "won," Sullivan passed the poem around to a group of his poet friends, who in turn submitted their own terrible poems to the site. Before long, they started penning and sending these "bad" poems to one another, more poets joined in, and a private Listserv was born.

"To be honest with you," Sullivan says, "we started this list to do a hundred-page anthology of just garbage." To create such garbage, the group latched onto a technique poet Drew Gardner had been using to construct his own work: searching the Internet for random terms and crafting the results into poems. Soon, the poets started riffing off one another's lines and competing to create the most outrageous pieces. Sullivan used this technique to write a poem titled "Flarf Balonacy Swingle," and the collective quickly adopted Flarf as a verb, adjective, and noun to describe what they were doing. They were "flarfing" their "flarf" poems, which were, of course, "flarfy."

But then a funny thing happened: Their poems evolved from "bad" to "sort of great," Gardner says. "What we were really doing was throwing out rules that were constraining and ridiculous and weren't fitting anymore. Once we did that, we could do whatever we wanted—we weren't trying to ask: Is this magazine going to like this? Is this poet going to like this? Is my teacher going to like this? We just got rid of all of it and went nuts."""Almost a decade after its creation, the experimental poetry movement Flarf—in which... more