Bacn

Wanted e-mails (ie, not spam) which clutter inboxes.

published on: Schott's Vocab

Reporting on Gmail’s new priority inbox, Paul Boutin wrote on The Time’s Gadgetwise Blog:

Spam e-mail is no longer the biggest problem most e-mail users face. The bigger problem today is keeping up with the volume of stuff you do want to receive. For many people, messages from co-workers and friends are sprinkled among Facebook notifications, Twitter direct messages, mailing lists to which they’ve subscribed, offers from online merchants with whom they do business and news alerts on favorite topics.

There’s a new slang word for all that stuff: bacn.

The idea is that bacn is better than spam, but you don’t have to eat it right now. The problem with bacn is that the constant stream of new messages in your in-box can cause you to visually overlook an important e-mail, leaving a crucial issue unresolved.

In article for NPR, Eric Weiner noted the increasingly popularity of the term, and observed:

The blog tracking site Technocrati rates “bacn” as a top search term. There’s an official bacn Web site. And already, derivatives have popped up, such as “FakinBacn”— spam posing as bacn.