Here’s another word I don’t like: ‘Feed’, used in the internet sense, as in ‘there are a lot of angry people in my Twitter feed today.’ It always jars when I come across it. But the odd part in this case is that it’s actually quite an expressive word to use. What grates with me, now I think about it, is its use in an unironic/uncritical way.
In fact I’d go as far as to say that, if nobody used it in this unironic way, I might choose it myself. It has a suitably industrial and impersonal feel. It makes me think of a machine that dispenses food pellets at timed intervals to animals in a battery farm. If had not already been stripped of those connotations, it would do the job pretty well.
See also Problematic (#1), Heft, Grin (#2)
