For a while now, something has been bothering me. It's not particularly menacing or sinister, just annoying and unavoidable. It's a word, and I see it in the comments section of YouTube videos and hear it from the mouths of guffawing teenage girls next to me on the subway. Sometimes it even makes an unwelcome appearance on my cell phone in the form of a text message. The word I'm talking about is random—and I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Facebook Groups have risen in opposition to this ubiquitous six-letter expression. There is "Irritated by the incorrect use of the word 'random,'" "I HATE the word [...]

Oh, Mexico! It's "a land so rich in slang and wordplay (much of it salty but freely used) that a newcomer armed with book-learned Spanish might feel he had studied for the wrong test." HAHA RIGHT? UNLIKE FRANCE OR RUSSIA OR CHINA. (Whoops, sorry.) Anyway! Thus begins what is a phenomenally dim little piece in the Los Angeles Times this week. Salty! Freely used! Unlike in New York City or London, where in our fine English language we never speak in slang. (What would that trashy Charles Dickens make of this? Hell, what would Evelyn Waugh say?) Here's the deal: nearly all other Spanish-speaking people hate both Mexican [...]