From The Atlantic Wire, by Jen Doll:

First, let it be said that words are not terrible. Often, word-hate is not the fault of the word itself; it’s due to the meanings humans have attributed to the poor word. It’s us, not them. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s just say that the public has many opinions about which of our frequently or occasionally used English words are “bad” or “good.” On Friday I’d argued, in response to Sarah Miller’s nomination of literally as the worst word on the planet, that the dubious achievement actually belongs to actually. As it turns out this is a topic a lot of people have feelings about, so many feelings that we could practically create an entire dictionary of words you hate. So we did. The following A to Z list is culled from your comments, emails, tweets, and occasionally from our own strong opinions.

 

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