A major Internet site, LuLu.com, where authors can self-publish their works and bypass agents, editors and the rest of the usual publishing industry hierarchy, commissioned a poll recently. They asked United Kingdom Net users their nominations for the most irritating Web-influenced words.

They tried to narrow the results down to 10, but ended up with 13 because three terms ended up tied for 10th place.

The clear winner, however, was the arcane-sounding folksonomy, All the words have differing degrees of annoyance and irritation, says Peter Freedman, who helped organize the survey and also was behind a related project, the LuLu Blooker prize, awarded to the three categories of blooks, or books created from Weblogs, commonly called blogs.

"Everyone said what an awful word blook was," says Freedman. "Everyone grimaced and groaned. And even before that, there was blogosphere. It has to be the worst word ever invented. Then, I started noticing more and more of these neologisms, combinations of Web-influenced words."

The notion that the Web influences language is nothing new, notes Robert E. Rosenwein, a professor in Lehigh University's Sociology and Anthropology department who specializes in social interactions in cyberspace.

"When the telephone was invented more than 100 years ago, it changed the way people talked," Rosenwein notes.

"Language is always evolving. As new technology comes along, which has its own kind of restraints, it is going to change the language," Rosenwein says. "Some educators worry about this, that grammar and spelling will go from bad to worse. I don't worry too much about it. People have a good skill at compartmentalizing. They know that a certain kind of language is for one situation, and not for a another."

This is the first year the LuLu Blooker people have released a list of the top 10 (well, 13, actually) most annoying Web-influenced words. For the past two years, the LuLu Blooker folks have recognized Web authors of fiction, non-fiction and comic books. The title, Blooker, is a reference to blook, the blog-derived book, but also is a nod toward the more well-established Man Booker Prize, the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary award.

An American, Colby Buzzell, won the 2007 LuLu Blooker top non-fiction prize for "My War: Killing Time In Iraq," and a $10,000 prize.

The LuLu Blooker folks plan to make their Top 10 list an annual event, much like their literary awards, Freedman says. A few early front-runners for next year's Top 10 include Slash/Dot and pajamahadeen.

To be "Slash/Dotted," is to have an article posted on slashdot.org, which features news about technology, and is also a reference to getting your Web site mentioned on Slashdot.org and having your site crash because of the number of visitors, Freedman says.

Pajamahadeen is a reference to the increasingly powerful world of the bloggers, who, legend has it, sit around in their pajamas all day, blogging, Freedman says. The word is a mashup or portmanteau of Mujahideen, the Islamic militia (literally "strugglers") and pajama.