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<\/div>\n<\/p>\nLAST week Johnson picked his Word of the Year<\/a> for 2013. And now that the holiday guests are gone and the house is finally clean again, it\u2019s time to look at the mess left behind, and do a little sorting of the lexicon.<\/p>\n People rather like end-of-the-year “Worst Words” columns, it seems. Timothy Egan chipped in \u201cWords for the Dumpster<\/a>\u201d in the New York Times <\/em>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<\/a> are the first few hundred of them. Memorise them, strike them from your vocabulary, and then read on.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Now we can turn to a bit of analysis of what annoys people.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Pause-fillers.<\/strong> Huge numbers of people nominated like<\/em> 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<\/em>\u2019scommenters voted to ban…Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n