What's the most annoying new tech word? Sexting? Defriend? Or Twittersphere?

A study carried out by YouGov for Computeractive magazine has found that many of the tech-related words which have been working their way into our everyday vocabulary (see retweet, sexting, defriend and tweetup) actually make many of us very VERY angry.

According to the study, the most hated word is ‘sexting’, with 24% of those polled claiming that’s by far the worst of a bad bunch. Interestingly ‘intexicated’ came in second with 13% which I’ve NEVER heard before, but have since found out refers to being intoxicated by a high volume of texts. What strange imagery that conjures up…

Unsurprisingly, the likes of ‘defriend’, ‘twittersphere’ and ‘tweetup’ also made the list.

Although many of these words clearly make many wince, it’s interesting to see how language has evolved along with technology. The truth is many of these words may seem annoying, but they’re necessary to describe new ways of thinking and behaving. After all sexting sounds much better than “sending naughty texts” and defriend would be particularly long winded, “removing someone as a Facebook friend, but they weren’t necessarily an actual friend in the first place, but now they’re neither”.

[Image via relgar]