WordLo

Definition: The slobber-inducing dog snacks from the Scooby Doo cartoon have been slang for pretty much anything craveable. In these recessionary times, though, the term refers to the cheap tokens employers toss out as "incentives."

Usage: Alan thought his 80-hour workweeks would get him a bonus. Instead, he got Scooby Snacks -- two tickets to the charity hockey game and an ergonomic chair, ganked from the manager on maternity leave.

Source: Entrepreneur

After you lost your "job-job," you've been "decruited" more than once—maybe that "job stopper" on your neck had something to do with it—and because your financial outlook is somewhere between "blark" and "Full Walton" lately, you've been alternating between "Wonderbreading" and the "Peanut Butter Challenge" and need to get "approval from corporate" before you buy even one lousy coffee. Does that sentence make any sense to you?
If so, there's no need to read Coupon Sherpa's 25 Recessionista Slang Terms, which would tell you that, for instance, "decruited" means:

To be fired from a position you haven't even started.
Usage: "Man, they decruited me before I finished the orientation."

Here, some other recession-era words and phrases:

Recession porn: With an apparently resurgent economy, the media genre known as recession porn may be gone for good. What, exactly, is recession …

By Ilya Leybovich

Here we look at the worst examples of office-speak, along with some words that deserve a place in our professional vocabulary. Not all corporate buzzwords are without their usefulness.
Everyone has encountered business jargon at one time or another. Whether hearing them from your boss, coworkers or customers, buzzwords can be a major source of irritation, obscuring rather than clarifying someone's point. There are, however, some types of business lingo that can aid in effective communication. Knowing the difference between helpful business language and the kind that should be banned is an increasingly vital skill in today's communication-driven workplace.
"When we talk about business jargon, we are generally referring to one of two things — words that are peculiar to a trade or words that are pretentious, unintelligible or gibberish," small business advisory Flying Solo explains. "And sometimes we can experience a spectacular combination of the tw…

published on: cbsnews

MarketWatch's Marshall Loeb Translates Some Of The Latest Conference Room Lingo
(MarketWatch) Buzzwords have always been a part of the business lexicon. But just like street slang, the language of business changes. For instance, today's business words are heavily influenced by the technological times we live in.

From Megan Aemmer of MSN Encarta, here are some popular buzzwords to help you decode the jargon of today's business world:

Offline: You speak to someone offline when you need to talk with them in person or one on one on the phone rather than via email or instant message. It can surface in a meeting or conference call, when some sensitive or long-winded issue comes up that can be discussed more privately or efficiently without the group. "Let's take that offline, after the meeting."

Ping. Also Pinging: If you need to get someone's attention, you "ping" them, usually via email or instant message. Before the Internet, ping …

posted on: blog.oregonlive.com

The English language is a vast restaurant kitchen. New words and phrases are brought in, cooked up, served to customers and thoughtfully chewed. Most are quickly spit out in disgust. But sometimes an offering is tasty enough to add to the menu.

Wordspy.com collects some of the more popular selections. So take a nibble.

downager: A person who acts younger than his or her age.

meh-sayer: A person who expresses indifference or apathy toward something.

sexsomnia: A sleep disorder in which a person engages in sexual behavior while asleep.

recombobulate: To recover from a state of confusion or disorganization.

jihobbyist: A person who is interested in and sympathetic to the goals of radical Islam, but who is not a member of a radical group.

nutritarian: A person who chooses foods based on their micronutrient content.

auto-eating: Eating without thinking or being hungry.

hurry sickness: A malaise where a person feels chronically short of time, and so tends to perform eve…

published on: CNN

From "scalable" to "enterprise," many words enter our business lingo, but some say they're just mumbo-jumbo. Here's the plain English explanation of buzzwords that can leave you going "huh?": In the business world, we tend to be overly fond of fancy words and phrases, says a recent article from the Associated Press. For example, high-tech companies don't simply make products, they "provide solutions." And those solutions don't simply perform tasks, they give us "experiences."
In short, we've gotten carried away--something that tech terminology expert Alan Freedman realized when people started asking him to decode the marketing materials of technology companies. And this marketing speak is supposed to get people to purchase products.
Even Freedman, who's written technology encyclopedias for 25 years, is left confused by the latest slew of buzzwords. "The marketing people are so bad at hyping t…

In what could presage mounting difficulties for USA healthcare reform roll-out, the top buzzwords associated with the Massachusetts Healthcare Reform ‘narrative’ have been found to be Rationing, Out-of-control-spending, Price Controls, Non-sustainable, and Mandate Failure.

In addition, Gaming the System was the key underlying trend that was discovered. The results of the Healthcare NarrativeTracker Index™ (NTI™) were reported earlier today by The Global Language Monitor, the media analytics company, and OpenConnect, an innovator in defining and improving process efficiency.
The NTI focused on the unfolding narrative about the Massachusetts Healthcare Reform Law since it is frequently cited as a model for the national legislation. The analysis was performed to better understand and help clarify the national healthcare reform discourse.
“There is a very good possibility that what we are learning from the Massachusetts Healthcare Reform can be applied directly to the national healthcare ref…

There's no reference to Hegel in the Tory manifesto, but there is an allusion to one of the founding fathers of conservative thought, Edmund Burke. The "institutional building blocks of the Big Society", the document reads, "[are] the 'little platoons' of civil society".
“Little platoons" is a phrase that occurs in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the classic expression of conservative scepticism about large-scale attempts to transform society in the image of abstract ideals. The Tories today use it to refer to the local associations that would go to form a "broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation".
The problem is that, for Burke, little platoons weren't groups that you volunteer to join; they were the "social subdivisions" into which you are born - the kind of traditionalism you would have thought Cameron's rebranded "progressive" Conservatives would want to avoid.
The…

published on: Techrepublic

A buzzword is a popular moniker for a phenomenon, idea, or practice. Some buzzwords start out as clever or insightful metaphors, but by the time they’re called buzzwords, any metaphoric value has died; and yet, the word continues to be overused, and it therefore becomes part of the “buzz” about a topic — often more background noise than substance.
Buzzwords represent a subset of a larger phenomenon: words that are used for an effect that lies beyond their strict definitions. The most extreme example of the class is the word, which stretches the definition of the word word. It has no denotation of its own, but its meaning when used is “I’m thinking about what I want to say next, but I don’t want to yield the floor to anyone else in the meantime.”
Another word that relies mostly on meta-meaning is basically. At face value, the word basically denotes the fundamental nature of something, or a summarization. In practice, though, it says “I’m giving you the short ver…

published on: Consumer Report

The issue of distracted driving has become a hot-button safety topic in the past year and has generated a great deal of discussion about solutions to this growing problem. The group behind the simulator has come up with a few terms related to the distracted-driving phenomena. We’re not sure whether these will make it into Webster’s Dictionary, but here are a few of our favorites.

Textgating: Like tailgating, this refers to driving dangerously close to another car because your attention is focused on texting or other distractions.

Textident: A collision caused by someone who's too busy with their phone to drive safely.

Smerge: The combination of swerving and merging due to driving distracted.

Crash-test dummy: Someone who will likely get into an accident due to using a phone, texting or some other distraction behind the wheel.

published on: Global Language Monitor

In conjunction with the SXSW Interactive conference held in its hometown, The Global Language Monitor has released the most confusing high tech buzzwords of the decade (2000-2009). Topping the list are HTTP, Flash, God Particle, Cloud Computing, and Plasma (as in plasma TV). Rounding out the Top Ten were IPOD/IPAD, Megapixel, Nano, Resonate and Virtualization.The most confusing Acronym for the decade was SOA (Service Oriented Architecture).“SXSW has long been a harbinger for future directions in popular culture and now the gathering has taken on the added dimension of technological innovation,” said Paul JJ Payack, president of the Global Language Monitor, “The words we use in high technology continue to become even more obtuse even as they move out of the realm of jargon and into the language at large.”The Global Language Monitor uses a proprietary algorithm, the Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI) to track the frequency of words and phrases in …