Totes annoying: words that should be banned

The internet is the source of many crimes against language - and these are among the worst offenders

We all have a watershed word - the word that tells us it's all over, that the internet has won, and our youth is gone for ever. For me, it was Yolo, or You Only Live Once. It was born, I used it, and rooms fell eerily silent as soon as it left my mouth. Yolo belonged to the others, the younger people; it carbon-dated me and I was envious.

You might call it snobbery but, for me, every delicious new bit of slang reminds me I'm being left behind, along with VHS cassettes, legwarmers and Lady Gaga. Susie Dent, Countdown's resident lexicographer, tells me I should lighten up. "Slang has always moved this way," she says. "From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they're tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out." The linguist and author David Crystal agrees: "Remember the old maxim - the chief use of slang is to show you're one of the gang."