WordLo

Learn some fun royal wedding words!

Flower girl: the 3-year-old bridesmaid Grace van Cutsem, covering her ears while Britain's Prince William kisses his wife Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.
Briet: A diet that a bride uses to lose weight before her wedding day. [Bridal + diet.]
Wedmin: Portmanteau term reportedly being used by Prince Harry to describe his royal wedding planning. [Wedding + Admin.]

Fascinator: A fascinator is a headpiece, a style of millinery. The word originally referred to a fine, lacy head covering akin to a shawl and made from wool or lace. Read more>>

Golden ticket: invitations sent out to 100 individuals who were randomly selected from the public to enjoy the ceremony alongside Prince William and Kate Middleton’s guests.

Charitable Gift Fund: Instead of sending gifts, Kate Middleton and Prince William have asked well-wishers to contribute to one of five causes through Prince William’s Foundation—the Foundation of Prince Wil…

What is a moblog? What is nptech? and what about splogs?
The social media landscape is fast changing and filled with strange terms to the uninitiated. Here’s a quick guide to some of the terms you may encounter!

Socialbrite.org

Financial lingo can also be funny sometimes!

A sample from The Wall Street Journal:"Some Financial Lingo Redefined":
Federal Reserve: Extremely powerful, like God, and also moves in strange and mysterious ways.
Commodities: Pigs with lipstick.
Lottery tickets: Buying opportunity for folks who feel they don't pay enough state taxes.
Car lease: Chance to pretend you are wealthy, while getting poorer with every monthly payment.
Credit cards: Another chance.
Read more on:WSJ.com

A selfless hero trying to save his country from a holocaust.Source: Guardian.co.uk

A word coined by the language scholar John Algeo to describe excessive reverence for the authority of a dictionary.

Source: Boston.com

Portmanteau of "enjoying" and "engineering" used by car-maker SEAT.


"When you get behind the wheel of a SEAT car, you don’t just go for a drive, you go for an experience. One that will capture your imagination and touch your emotions. That’s the essence of ENJOYNEERING."




Sources:
Schott's VocabSEAT

A customer-focused company culture.

Gary Vaynerchuk wrote on Entrepreneur.com:

We're living in what I like to call the "Thank You Economy", because only the companies that can figure out how to mind their manners in a very old-fashioned way -- and do it authentically -- are going to have a prayer of competing.

Social media requires that business leaders start thinking like small-town shop owners. This means taking the long view and avoiding short-term benchmarks to gauge progress. It means allowing the personality, heart and soul of the people who run all levels of the business to show. And doing their utmost to shape word of mouth by treating each customer as though he or she were the most important customer in the world.

In short, business leaders are going to have to relearn the ethics and skills our great-grandparents' generation used in building their own businesses and took for granted.

Source: Entrepreneur.com

The tailoring of globally produced products to make them suitable to local tastes and needs.

Glocalization often involves an international corporation tailoring their product to local tastes rather than trying to sell a ‘one size fits all’ version of their product in many markets.

Source:dictionaryblog.cambridge.org

A term that similarly indicates that women have been doing better at getting jobs than men since the economy began to improve.



But why are women faring so much better than men? It's due in large part to a few key industries dominated by one or the other of the sexes doing well or poorly. Source: The Atlantic
See also:

Mancession

Womenomics

Internet firms as a valuable source of economic insights.

Source: Economist

A new term coined to describe the women martyrs of the Egyptian protests. (blend of woman and martyr).

Source: Twitter
#jan25 #tahrir many chants by women & girls praise wartyrs of #revolution

An inexpensive, low-quality cappuccino, particularly one from a vending machine; a cappuccino made from brewed or instant coffee. Also: cheappuccino. [Blend of "cheap" and "cappuccino"]

Notes: The word "cappuccino" comes from the Capuchin monks, who were noted for wearing a robe that included a sharp-pointed hood, called a capuche. Legend has it that a monk named Marco d'Aviano invented the cappuccino in Vienna when the Turkish army broke of its siege of that city and left behind sacks of coffee so bitter that the monks had to cut it with milk to drink it. The resulting beverage was about the same color as the monk's brown robes, too, so that may also have had something to do with the name.

Source: Word Spy

The application of economics to explore and improve relationships.

Writing for The Daily Beast, Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson offered the following advice for improving one’s sex life – “Make it affordable”:

"Let’s explain. All that stuff about foreplay and romance? That stuff takes time and energy. And if it’s one thing today’s couples don’t have in excess it’s time and energy. We just wrote a book about this very topic. It’s called Spousonomics, and it looks at ways economics can help people improve their
relationships."

Source:

"How Can Economics Improve a Marriage? Ask the Authors of Spousonomics", by Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics, NYTimes

The Daily Beast

Schott's Vocab

A person who has the same name as you, and whose online references are mixed in with yours when you run a Google search on your name. Blend of: Google-ganger. [Google + doppelgänger]

Example Citations:
The point is, when you Google yourself, it's a bit of a blow to your ego when you discover that: A) your name isn't unique, and B) other people have done more with it than you. These are your so-called Googlegangers, from the German "doppelgänger."
—Casey Phillips, "Reflections in an online mirror," Chattanooga Times Free Press, April 16, 2010



Source: WordSpy

A person known to another through online communication only (as via email or Internet social networking)

Source: Merriam Webster

Automagically: Automatically in a way that seems magical.

Bargainous: Costing less than expected.

Big media: Primary mass communication sources, e.g., TV and the press.

Buzzkil: Person or thing that has a depressing effect.

Carbon credit: Permit allowing a certain amount of carbon dioxide emissions.

Carbon offsetting: Counteraction of CO2 emissions with a corresponding reduction.

Catastrophize: To present a situation as worse than it is.

Cheeseball: Lacking taste or style.

Chillax: To calm down and relax.

Eggcorn: Logical swap of words with similar sounds (from "egg corn" for "acorn").

Flyover states: Central regions of the U.S.

Frenemy: Friend with whom one has frequent conflict.

Gal pal: Female friend.

Green audit: Analysis of a business' environmental impact.

Green-collar: Of or relating to workers in the environmentalist business sector.

Hater: Negative person.

Homeshoring: Moving jobs to employees' homes (from "offshoring").

Hypermiling: Altering a car to max…

The popularity of something (such as a story or Web page) that is spread quickly and usually by direct recommendations rather than advertisements or news media.

Source: Merriam Webster

• Fidgetal - blend of finger and digital. Referred to the use of the fingers to provide input above a mobile device.

• MisApp - something going terribly wrong due to over reliance on latest Phone gizmo

• Wikisqueak - sound emitted by diplomat who realises she's sent confidential telegram without proper encryption

• Dreadsheet - spreadsheet containing very bad financial news

• Disgracebook - social networking site advertising user's embarrassing past

• Mobile drone - lover of interminable tedious and public phone conversations

• Sin card - alternative device to fit in mobile for immoral communication

• Powerpointless - universal feeling in room at end of hi-tech executive presentation of negligible value

• Skypeochondria - queasy feeling brought on by obsessive fear of being offline

• Scroogele - search engine for people trying to find cheapest online gifts

Source: BBC, "The future is fidgetal"

Surfing a social networking site instead of working.

Source: Word Spy

Pausing for thought.

Source: BBC, "The future is fidgetal"