There’s something unbearably smug about geeks who invent new words — not that inventing words is a bad thing, it’s just that in the tech world, the new words usually come freighted with more than just a definition.

In fact, they usually come packaged with an entire sensibility, and are often used to create little fan clubs for the product, service or concept the words are meant to define. They are also often used to exclude people who don’t understand them. 

I’m convinced this is what happened with that awful word “solution” — it was seized by managers who had no idea what it was that their engineers made, and so created a word that to them sounded sexy to cover their ignorance.

Some words have been cute, others flat-out ugly.

It’s the latter group that’s being celebrated by the Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary award for “blooks.” And what’s a blook? It’s a book based on blogs. The word has been around for five years — if you haven’t heard it before, where have you been? It’s so popular that this month it was accepted as a real word by the latest (ninth) edition of the Collins English Dictionary.

This is the second year that the Lulu Blooker Prize has been handing out awards for words most likely to make Web users “wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard.” The Lulu Blooker Prize is the brainchild of Bob Young, CEO of Lulu, the self-publishing site, who sponsors the Blooker. Young’s position is that the tech revolution has created a “new golden age for words, the greatest since Shakespeare’s.”

This year’s winner is “folksonomy” — a hybrid of "folks" and "taxonomy" -- and is defined as a system for classifying Web content by tagging key words.

“Folksonomy,” says Young, is “a word to make you howl in the night.” 

After Folksonomy, other words considered for the prize are:

— Blogosphere (the collective term for all blogs);

— Blog (an online journal);

— Netiquette (Internet etiquette);

— Blook (a book based on a blog)

— Webinar (a web or online seminar)

— Vlog (a video blog);

— Social Networking (using the Web to form "virtual communities" on sites like "MySpace".com);

— Cookie (a text file stored on your computer from a website you've visited);

— Wiki (A collaborative website, editable by its readers);

— Podcast (a downloadable audio file; like an audio blog);

— Avatar (A cartoon likeness of oneself, used to communicate online);
 
— User-generated content (Web content created by users, as on YouTube.com)

The voting was conducted by pollsters at YouGov, who raised a great quote from a blogger who was reacting to the word “blook” by ranting, “How do they come up with those words? Alcohol? Prozac? Traumatic childhood experiences in English class?"

Lexicologists at the Collins English Dictionary, which is known as being the dictionary most likely to accept new words, have also accepted other tech words or phrases for inclusion in their dictionary for the first time. They include:

— “File sharing” (the practice of sharing computer data or space on a network);

— “Generation C" (the people who create and publish material such as blogs, podcasts, videos, etc, on the internet);

— "Godcast" (a religious service or sermon that has been converted to MP3 format for download from the internet for play on a computer or MP3 player);

— "Metaverse" (a 3D virtual world, especially in an online role-playing game);

— "Google-bombing" (the practice of attempting to affect the ranking of websites provided by Google).