I don't really hate the sound of any English word. English is a beautiful, soft and fluid language, especially American English. Only netspeak and language riddled with expletives make me cringe. Not that I have a problem with expletives per se, but I prefer that people use them sparingly.
All words that annoy me are German. The entire German language annoys me nowadays. It's as if my distant ancestors had a perverse fondness for aggressive, intimidating noises. The angry hissing of cats, the guttural snarling of dogs, the spitting and rattling of snakes, the high-pitched whistle of boiling water, or the sizzling of hot ash when it hits the ground. For some weird reason, my ancestors tried to imitate these threatening sounds and worked them into their language. The modern day result sounds like a Klingon with chronic bronchitis who tries to throw up on an empty stomach after a night of heavy drinking. I don't like to hear German and don't want to speak it anymore. It makes both my ears and my throat hurt.
But the German grammar is even worse. The English grammar enables me to start talking while I'm still trying to figure out what to say, or how to best say it. But when I speak German, I need to have the complete sentence neatly layed out in my mind before I open my mouth. I can't say something like "Yes, I did mail the letter for the... erm... the insurance company." When I speak the article before having thought about the noun, I might use the wrong grammatical gender and have to say something strange like "the insurance company guy" instead to make it work grammatically.
To make things worse, we often put the verb or predicate at the end of the sentence, so something like "I mailed the letter for the insurance company last week on Tuesday before I went to work" turns into "I have the letter for the insurance company last week on Tuesday before I to work went mailed". When I reach the end of such a sentence, I've often already forgotten what I set out to say. English allows me to throw a compact core sentence out there -- "I did mail the letter" -- and then add additional details as they pop into my head. That's much easier for a nervous and random speaker with a short attention span like me.
Last edited by CrazyCatLord on 18 Jan 2012, 2:21 am, edited 1 time in total.