Here's a quick way to understand business jargon

If you are a person who cares about language and who possesses an adequate sense of humor, this website is for you.

"Unsuck It" is a place to explore the ways in which “professional” communication in English goes wrong and replaces any jargon and buzzword with simple language.

This website tries to tackle, in a funny way, the process that makes the English language sometimes ugly and inaccurate, other than difficult to understand. 

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Source: Unsuck It

I wrote 2U B4! British Library shows up textspeak as soooo 19th century

New exhibition features Victorian poems written like text messages, the rise of RP, and battles over the letter H

Mark Brown Arts correspondent

guardian.co.uk

A typical text message on a mobile phone. The British Library has unearthed examples of 19th century language using text msg abbreviation. GR8!

If u really r annoyed by the vocabulary of the text generation, then a new exhibition at the British Library should calm you down. It turns out they were doing it in the 19th century – only then they called it emblematic poetry, and it was considered terribly clever.
Details were announced today of the library's new exhibition devoted to the English language, exploring its 1,500-year history from Anglo-Saxon runes and early dictionaries to not dropping your Hs and rap.
The exhibition will open this winter after three years of planning.
One of the stars of the show will be the oldest surviving copy of Beowulf, the longest epic poem in Old English, which was written down at least 1000 years ago. There will also be the first book ever printed in English, which, reassuringly perhaps, has inconsistent spelling. The French are both "frensshe" and "frenshe" in Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, published by William Caxton in Flanders around 1473.
Roger Walshe, the British Library's head of learning, said it had been "a hugely ambitious project for us, but a hugely enjoyable one as well". He added: "There is always interest in language and there are always debates about whether language is changing or declining or improving and also what is influencing language. We felt we were uniquely placed to be able to give a historical perspective to that debate."

The journalese blacklist becomes collaborative

published on: Johnson

I'VE quickly become slack about maintaining my blacklist of tired phrases used by lazy journalists. (Seems this journalist is too lazy even to look for tired phrases.) But hooray! Someone has now starting doing it for me. A new web tool called Listiki lets people create lists of things and manage them collaboratively, and one Alison Gow ("Journalist, skier, biker. Usually in Liverpool, always over-caffenated") has created a list of journalistic clichés, to which 16 people have already contributed. Among them:

http://listiki.com/journalism-cliches-i-most-dislike

Outpouring (of grief/support/etc)

Grisly murders. Or brutal ones.

"Plummeted" meaning "was down a bit"

In scenes of reminiscent of (insert film/TV show here)

Only time will tell (I haven't a clue)

Yes, indeed. Will Listiki take off, and will this list turn into a comprehensive encyclopaedia of journalistic mediocrity? Only time will tell.

Generation X

published on: BBC

A poem by so-called 'Mini Meee' written in txt talk

Dear peers of mine wat r we thinkin?
Our health and lives r slowly driftin.
Can't u c ure hurtin each otha?
Can't u c ure hurtin ya mothas?
All this violence, sex and drugs,
Ain't nuthin fun bout bustin slugs.
My dear poor friends of Generation X,
Can't u c u havin too much sex?
Some girls in my school r pregnant and hopeless,
Jus go to school be calm and stay focused.
I had friends killed by drugs and drug relations,
Please say no, let's fight against 'em.
Do somethin' positive unlike dealin or doin,
Jus' have fun by dancin or hoopin.
So much in this world can kill in one second,
Like guns 'n' knives, they're dangerous weapons.
All these song bout shootin and chokin,
U think thas cool? U must b jokin!
Guns kill us quick, drugs kill us slow,
Sex makes us kill a life before it even grows.
Sex, drugs and violence,
Jus be safe and practice abstinence.
Please my Generation X friends,
Don't go down as STD fiends.
This is a poem for Generation X,
Stay alive, get your life in check.

Beach Blanket Lingo

By BEN ZIMMER

When Jake Tapper of ABC’s “This Week” asked Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey last month for his opinion of the MTV reality series “Jersey Shore,” the contempt in the governor’s voice was obvious. “What it does is it takes a bunch of New Yorkers — most of the people on ‘Jersey Shore’ are New Yorkers — drops them at the Jersey Shore and tries to make America feel like this is New Jersey,” Christie said. In other words, in the parlance of the Jersey Shore, the show is about a bunch of bennies — disagreeable tourists from the metropolitan New York region who crowd the beaches every summer.
When it comes to the seasonal exodus of sun worshipers to the Jersey Shore and other beach spots around the country, language can get fiercely local. It starts with the fundamentals: how do you describe your prospective trip to the beach? In Oregon, you might say you’re going “to the coast.” In New Jersey, you invariably go “down the shore.” Baltimore natives, meanwhile, say they’re going “down the ocean” — but in Baltimorese (make that Bawlmerese), the phrase sounds more like “downy eaushin.” The down of “down the shore” and “down the ocean” doesn’t necessarily imply a southward journey. As in many dialects along the Eastern Seaboard, down can be used as a preposition indicating movement from the inland toward the shoreline.
Once you get to your destination, you might find that the locals have some colorful epithets for you. Old-time New Englanders have disdain for the summer people. On the Eastern Shore of Virginia and Maryland, the come-heres are pitted against the from-heres. Hawaiians call white visitors to the islands haoles. West Coast surfers, a territorial lot, have a plethora of terms for nonlocals: Trevor Cralle’s “Surfin’ary: A Dictionary Of Surfing Terms and Surfspeak” lists put-downs like hondo, inlander, flatlander, valley and casper. (The last one is reserved for tourists whose pallid complexion resembles that of Casper the Friendly Ghost.)
On the Jersey Shore, the two main terms for unpleasant outsiders are bennies and shoobies. Roughly speaking, bennies are those who descend from the New York area to the beach towns of Monmouth County and northern Ocean County (like Seaside Heights, where MTV shot the first season of “Jersey Shore”). Shoobies generally come from the Philadelphia region to towns farther south, with the southern tip of Long Beach Island marking the dividing line between the realms of bennies and shoobies.
Those lunches packed in shoe boxes were so associated with the influx of Philadelphia visitors that they likely gave rise to the term shoobie. The word researcher Barry Popik has traced the localism back to a 1952 recollection of Edward Brown, then a lifeguard in Ocean City, about 10 miles south of Atlantic City. Brown recalled that certain beaches “attracted hordes of ‘shoobies,’ day-trippers or weekend visitors who didn’t have a clue as to what the ocean might do in a fit of whimsy.”
Bennie or benny, though a newer word, is shrouded in greater mystery. The first print appearance documented by the Dictionary of American Regional English is in an unpublished paper by Robert A. Foster, detailing a lexical survey of New Jersey undertaken in 1977 and 1978. Foster wrote that bennie refers to “tourists from New York City and North Jersey,” and speculated that it comes from the Jewish name Benny, used as a label for Jews in general, “well-known in working-class New York City.”

Geek Speak

Have you ever been at a party with a bunch of "software industry" people and overheard a conversation that included something like this:
"I was sitting in the cube farm checking out the dead tree edition of the Times when some idea hamster comes in to ask for my help on a project. I told him I didn't have enough bandwidth to support him--that he should go find some gray matter to help him out."
Sound like a different language? It is. An entire lexicon of "geek speak" has emerged from the world of hardware and software. But the next time you feel left out at a party full of mouse potatoes, you can show your savvy by speaking the lingo. If you do it well enough, you might even be mistaken for the alpha geek.

Alpha geek: The most knowledgeable, technically proficient person in an office or work group. "Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek around here."

Bandwidth: The ability to juggle or handle an excessive amount of stuff. "I'm really busy and don't have the bandwidth to dedicate to your issue right now."

Cobweb site: A World Wide Web site that hasn't been updated for a long time. A dead Web page.

Cube farm: An office filled with cubicles.

Dead tree edition: The paper version of a publication available in both paper and electronic forms, as in: "The dead tree edition of the San Francisco Chronicle..."

Doorstop: A computer that is no longer considered fast enough or to contain insufficient storage, etc. for use in normal work. All 286's and 386's are doorstops. Most 486's are now doorstops. Soon we'll see Pentium doorstops.

Egosurfing: Scanning the net, databases, print media, or research papers looking for the mention of your name.

Gray matter: Older, experienced business people hired by young entrepreneurial firms looking to appear more reputable and established.

Idea hamsters: People who always seem to have their idea generators running.

Keyboard plaque: The disgusting buildup of dirt and crud found on computer keyboards. "Are there any other terminals I can use? This one has a bad case of keyboard plaque."

Let's take this off-line: Let's talk about this later, after the meeting.

Liveware: Slang for people. Also called wetware or jellyware, as opposed to hardware, software, and firmware.

Mouse potato: The online, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

Nonlinear Inappropriately intense negative response. "I told him we didn't have any Starbucks' Gazebo Blend and he went totally nonlinear."

Ppen-collar: workers People who work at home or telecommute.

Plug-and-play: A new hire who doesn't need any training. "The new guy, John, is great. He's totally plug-and-play."

Randomize: To divert someone from his or her goal with tertiary tasks or niggling details. "Marketing has totally randomized me by constantly changing their minds about the artwork."

Stress puppy: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

Total disconnect: An extremely low-bandwidth human interaction. "It was a total disconnect. I spent half an hour explaining how this stuff worked, and he just didn't get it."

Uninstalled: Euphemism for being fired.

published on: mainframe.org

Cloud Compunding's World of Acronyms: Enter at Your Own Risk

published on: advice.cio.com

With Forrester Research's help, I attempt to demystify the Cloud flavors known as SaaS, PaaS and IaaS for enterprise software.
What hasn't the high-tech industry done to the poor "Cloud Computing" moniker? For the past couple years or so, "The Cloud" has been hyped up like a LeBron James appearance, contorted like a Yoga-practicing Swami, poked and prodded again and again, and then hijacked by just about every apps vendor in the known universe.
Sucked up in the marketing vortex of cloud computing's hurricane were software-delivery models SaaS (software-as-a-service) and "Web-based" or "on-demand" computing. Along for the ride now—and further flummoxing market watchers and IT customers—are more aaS's: PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service). (And don't forget about "private" and "public" clouds!)
Perhaps our favorite was the Governance-as-a-Service solution we heard about this winter. Yes, that's GaaS, friends. (But I digress.)
On occasion, it seems that even the most informed tech-vendor executives and marketing folks are just as confused as the rest of us. Or, perhaps even more insidious, they do know what they're saying—how they're bending truths and glossing over factual, technical inaccuracies—all in the name linking their product or service to The Cloud.
Defining cloud in the broadest of terms is not forbidden according to today's marketing rules. Many a vendor now calls any old app that runs via the Web a "cloud computing solution." (I'm actually doing "cloud blogging" right now!)
Nevertheless, it appears that The Cloud and its marketing-licious brood are here to stay. So what does it all actually mean?
In a new Forrester Research report, principal analyst Paul Hamerman provides definitions for each as well as examples of vendors that offer products and services in each category. It's a great place to start if you're a little overwhelmed by cloud lingo. Let's do it together!
First, this is how Forrester defines cloud computing:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
OK, I buy that. Then the report then drills down further into the mix:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS): Finished applications that are available on a rental basis.

• Platform-as-a-service (PaaS): A developer platform that abstracts the infrastructure and middleware.

• Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS): A deployment platform consisting of virtualized hosting services.

Ti unfriendo perché mi sessaggi

tratto da:punto informatico

Il verbo da Facebook "unfriend" arriva nei dizionari di lingua inglese e diventa parola dell'anno. D'altronde la lingua è una questione sociale, e questi sono social network: appunto Roma - Negli ultimi anni il linguaggio della Rete ha ricevuto sempre più la consacrazione dei vocabolari, e della lingua ufficiale che cambia e si piega alle esigenze e ai tempi dei nuovi mezzi: così già erano entrati nel linguaggio comune Twitter, Facebook e blog (anche come verbi twittare, facebookare e bloggare). E, anche quest'anno, il social network in blu è protagonista dell'evoluzione degli idiomi.
È ancora Facebook l'origine della parola che meglio rappresenta il 2009: Unfriend (verbo), che secondo l'Oxford Dictionary significa "rimuovere qualcuno come amico da un social network come Facebook".
Oltre a questo neologismo nato dal web 2.0, nel 2010 saranno riconosciuti altri termini sorti dall'ICT. Solo per fare alcuni esempi, Twitter contribuisce con hashtag, il cellulare con intexticated (distratto perché occupato a messaggiare sul telefonino mentre impegnato alla guida di un veicolo) e sexting (inviare immagini o messaggi con i cellulare dal contenuto sessuale esplicito).

Animal names for economies

Will a new pride of economic lions take their place beside the Chinese dragon and the Indian tiger?


The term "tiger economies" to refer to the fab four of Asia dates back to the 1960s. (They are also known as the "little dragons" owing to China's influence.) Ireland adopted the "Celtic tiger" in the 1990s, despite there being no such beast—presumably it was worried that calling itself the "hare economy" would make it sound flaky. Scotland made a bid for "Celtic Lion" in 1997, on the reasonable basis that there is at least a lion on the Scottish Royal Standard. It never took off, though; neither did Scotland.Curiously, Russia's periodically hyperactive economy doesn't seem to have a common animal name. The "bear economy" is an obvious no-no, but people rarely use "tiger", even though there are tigers in Russia. Perhaps that's because they're Siberian tigers, which are in danger of going extinct. Sadly for Africa, though, the term "lion economies" and the associated predictions of an imminent boom are at least ten years old. Maybe they're hibernating lions.P.S.: It's a "pride of lions" and a "streak of tigers", but does anyone know the collective noun for dragons?

Source: Johnson