We don’t like being told “no.” At least not according to preliminary votes from Oxford Dictionaries’ attempt to collect data on English speakers’ least favorite words in late August. Unfortunately, while the publishers of the OED did get a number of legitimate responses, they shut down the contest after one day because Internet users can’t help but troll. Or, as Ryan Harrington at Melville House put it:
And, just like that, we had turned the cross-cultural linguistic project into nothing more than a high school bathroom stall full of hate speech and cussin’.
