A Glossary for Modern Times
You can't be cool if you're using outdated lingo. Here's the latest
from the corporate and Silicon Valley jungles.
- assmosis
- The process by which some people seem to absorb success and
advancement by kissing up to the boss.
- batmobiling
- putting up emotional shields (from the retracting armor that covers
the batmobile, as in "she started talking marriage and he started
batmobiling")
- beepilepsy
- afflicts those with vibrating pagers characterized by sudden
spasms, goofy facial expressions and loss of speech
- betamaxed
- when a technology is overtaken in the market by inferior but better
marketed competition, as in "Microsoft betamaxed Apple right out of
the market"
- blowing your buffer
- losing your train of thought
- body Nazis
- Hard-core exercise and weightlifting fanatics who look down on
anyone who doesn't work out obsessively.
- chips and salsa
- Chips = hardware, salsa = software. i.e.: "Well, first we gotta
figure out if the problem's in your chips or your salsa."
- CLM - Career Limiting Move
- Used among microserfs to describe ill-advised activity. Trashing
your boss while he or she is within earshot is a huge CLM.
- cobweb
- a WWW site that never changes
- cube farm
- An office filled with cubicles.
- deinstalled
- Euphemism for being fired. Heard on the voice mail of a Vice
President at a downsizing computer firm: "You have reached the number
of a deinstalled vice president. Please dial our main number and ask
the operator for assistance.
- Elvis year
- the peak year of popularity, as in "1993 was Barney the dinosaur's elvis
ear"
- generica
- fast food joints, strip malls, sub-divisions, as in "we were so
lost in generica that I couldn't remember what city it was"
- going postal
- totally stressed out and losing it, like postal employees who go on shooting
rampages
- G.O.O.D. Job - A "Get-Out-Of-Debt" job
- A well-paying job people take in order to pay off their debts, one
that they will quit as soon as they are solvent again.
- high dome
- egghead, scientist, PhD
- idea hamsters
- People who always seem to have their idea generators running.
- irritainment
- annoying but you can't stop watching, e.g. the O.J. trials, Ally
McBeal, Monica Lewinsky, ...
- meatspace (also carbon community, facetime,
F2F, RL)
- the physical world (as opposed to the virtual)
- mouse potato
- The on-line, wired generation's answer to the Couch Potato.
- Ohno-second
- That minuscule fraction of time in which you realise that you've
just made a BIG mistake.
- percussive maintenance
- the fine art of whacking a device to get it working
- prairie dogging
- in companies where everyone has a cubicle something happens and everyone
pops up to look
- ribs 'n' dick
- a budget with no fat, as in "we've got ribs 'n' dick and we're supposed to
find 20K for memory upgrades"
- salmon day
- swimming upstream all day to get screwed in the end
- seagull manager
- A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps over everything
and then leaves.
- siliwood (also hollywired)
- the coming convergence of movies, interactive TV and computers
- square headed girlfriend (boyfriend)
- computer
- SITCOMs
- What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of
them stops working to stay home with the kids. Stands for: Single
Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage.
- squirt the bird
- To transmit a signal to a satellite.
- starter marriage
- A short-lived first marriage that ends in divorce with no kids, no property and no regrets.
- stress puppy:
- A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.
- swiped out
- An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the
magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.
- tourists
- People who take training classes just to get a vacation from their
jobs. Example: "We had three serious students in the class; the rest
were just tourists."
- treeware
- manuals and documentation
- umfriend
- sexual relationship, as in "this is Dale, my...um...friend"
- Vulcan nerve pinch
- The taxing hand position required to reach all the appropriate keys
for certain commands. For instance, the warm re-boot for a Mac II
computer involves simultaneously pressing the Control key, the Command
key, the Return key and the Power On key. Sometimes referred to as the
THREE-FINGERED SALUTE.
- world wide wait
- WWW
- yuppie food coupons
- twenty dollar bills from an ATM. Often used when trying to split the
bill after a meal: "We owe $8 each, but all anybody's got are yuppie
food stamps."
Dr. Michael Juda
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
60 Garden Street, Mail Stop 70
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Ph.: (617) 495-7062
Fax: (617) 495-7356
E-mail:
mjuda@cfa.harvard.edu