Misty Harris, “Hate-Watching TV: The Year’s Biggest Small-Screen Trend” (Postmedia News, Nov. 22, 2012)
Linguist Ben Zimmer, chair of The American Dialect Society’s new words committee, has uncovered fan-forum citations for hate-watch (and its variants) as far back as 2005, though he notes the term didn’t find its footing until 2012. This likely happened on the steam of an April column in the New Yorker entitled “Hate-Watching Smash,” in which writer Emily Nussbaum expounded on her conflicted relationship with the NBC drama.
“I think (the expression) has staying power because it’s transparent,” said Zimmer, executive producer of Visual Thesaurus and Vocabulary.com. “Unlike other neologisms, which might require explanation, you can immediately figure out what it means if someone says, ‘I’m going to go hate-watch Glee.’”
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