How Do Words Make It Onto Those Worst-Word-of-the-Year Lists?

“People rather like [those] end-of-the-year … columns, it seems. Timothy Egan chipped in “Words for the Dumpster” in the New York Times 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 are the first few hundred of them. … Now we can turn to a bit of analysis of what annoys people.”