On August 24, Oxford Dictionaries launched a campaign to get people all over the world to report their least favorite English word. The goal was to create a global map of hated English words. Two days later, after more than 14,000 responses, Oxford suspended its #OneWordMap project because of “severe misuse.” The problem? Apparently, when you ask people for the words they hate, they tell you.
Oxford knew that asking for responses on the internet could draw some strong language, so their algorithm automatically filtered out bad words. Submit one, and you’d get this message: “OOPS. Swearing and offensive words are forbidden. Try again.” Swearing might be George Carlin’s “Filthy Words”—the ones that that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled can’t be said on radio or TV--plus the traditional British taboo terms that seem to be popping up on this side of the pond as well. But Oxford Dictionaries’ definition of “swearing and offensive words” went further, adding words that they didn’t want on their website because they leave a bad taste. That automatically excluded a whole tranche of English words that many people say they hate.
What’s left are harmless words like moist, already widely-reported to be the word people dislike most. Or hopefully as a sentence adverb. Or literally used figuratively. What I’m saying here is that Oxford’s plan to crown the world's most-hated English word was rigged from the start to ignore the really hated and hateful words. Sorry, when I ask my students, "What word do you hate most?" moist is never on the list. Instead there's the F-word, the N-word, the C-word, words like lame and retard and that's so gay, and words to that effect.
Worse still, Oxford excluded Islam. Islamophobia is “offensive” in that it stereotypes all the followers of a major religion. It’s OK to hate the word if you hate the concept it stands for. It’s also OK to reject comments that say, in effect, “I hate the word Islam because I hate the religion, or its practitioners”—that in itself is hateful speech. But it's probably not a good idea to label the name of the religion itself offensive, which is what the automatically-generated comment “Swearing and offensive words are forbidden” does.
And if this screenshot reproduced on Twitter is authentic, censorship is another banned word excluded by the algorithm:
At the point this next screenshot was taken, before Oxford shut things down, Brits were proclaiming Islam as their least favorite word nearly two-to-one over British. That’s surely a sign of the Islamophobia and general anti-immigrant feeling that led to the Brexit vote last June. But it also suggests that hating the word British, followed closely by Brexit itself, pushes back against the hatemongers and nativists who make so much foul noise.
Even with Islam filtered out, Brexit and British still make it onto the hated words list:
I don’t know whether Oxford’s highly-professional lexicographers thought up the words-we-hate survey, or it came from a PR department anxious to capitalize on people's love of internet surveys (I mean, do you really think you're Gryffindor material?), but whoever dreamed this up should have known that some people see a request for comments on the internet as an invitation to spew hate. And a lexicographer interested in finding out people’s true attitudes toward English words would steer clear of filters that skew the results toward inane prejudices against moist and the overuse of like as a filler. I mean, if you take the truly hateful words off the list before you start, what's left to hate?
I’m always tempted to answer least-favorite-word surveys by saying the word I hate most is survey. (And by the way, a word I really dislike is tranche, which I used in the second paragraph of this post, so hating words and avoiding them are two different things entirely.)
Serious word researchers should have known that least-favored-word surveys on the 'net are not going to be treated like a children’s party game. If you want to know the words that people hate, you should be prepared for some pretty raw stuff. At the very least, you should be prepared to listen to the answers to your question.
