Modern Euphemisms

I was looking through my unread emails and found a list of modern euphemisms, which was sent to me by a reader of mine. Since many of you reading today are at work, but wishing to be elsewhere, and probably won't get much done today as a result, I thought that today would be the perfect day to post this for you to enjoy.

404:

    Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking him ... he's 404, man."

Adminisphere:

    The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

Blamestorming:

    Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

Chainsaw Consultant:

    An outside expert brought in to reduce the employee headcount, leaving the top brass with clean hands.

Chips & Salsa:

    Chips = hardware, Salsa = software. "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 serious CLM.

Cube Farm:

    An office filled with cubicles.

Dilberted:

    To be exploited and oppressed by your boss. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the geek-in-hell comic strip character. "I've been Dilberted again. The old man revised the specs for the fourth time this week."

Mouse Potato:

    The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

Percussive Maintenance:

    The fine art of whacking the heck out of an electronic device to get it to work again. (Try not to dent the case.)

Prairie Dogging:

    When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

Salmon Day:

    The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

SITCOMs:

    (Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage) What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

Seagull Manager:

    A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

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. "We had three serious students in the class; the rest were just tourists."

Treeware:

    Hacker slang for documentation or other printed material.

Xerox Subsidy:

    Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

Okay, feel free to add your own euphemisms to this list.

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Not a modern euphemism.

Just wishing you a peaceful and relaxed day off from blogging tomorrow.

By Chris' Wills (not verified) on 24 Dec 2007 #permalink

I am off from work today and in the process of making sticky buns for Christmas morning. There will only be three of us this year...hopefully I won't eat too many. I also want to wish you a peaceful and happy holiday. I will be thinking of you!

Tabor - you couldn't send a few over here could you (address them to Bob, Helsinki, Finland and they should reach me. Or an advertising agency). My kitchen isn't large enough to swing a cat. But don't tell any animal welfare organisations that I know this.

And as this seems to be the place to say it - have a good Christmas, Grrl. And all of your readers!

Hmmm. The cat has disappreared. I guess he didn't like the washing up liquid in his milk.

Bob

"Swapper has the CPU"... not entirely modern, because Swapper is the task-switching process that runs on VMS, an operating system that nobody uses any more (but that was what I used in college in the late 1980's). This can happen to an individual person, or to an organization. You/they spend so much time moving between tasks that eventually no progress is made on any individual task.

"Offline" -- this one's used all the time to mean not in a meeting-- "let's have that discussion offline."

"Boldly Going" -- spacing out.