According to nearly every news source you can imagine, whatever is the word that Americans hate most of all.

Oh, except it isn’t. As Ben Zimmer at the Visual Thesaurus explains:

It’s important to note that the five words and phrases were preselected by the Marist pollsters. As you can see from the table of results that accompanied the announcement, 938 Americans were asked, “Which one of the following words or phrases do you find most annoying in conversation?” So there was no opportunity to pick a word or phrase that might annoy you more than the ones that Marist inquired about.

So basically, the whole thing is meaningless, and the media yet again shows itself to be entirely incapable of examining a press release for more than 10 seconds to see if it makes sense before reprinting it as news. Whatever.