Cool Corporate Lingo


You can't be cool if you're using outdated lingo. Here's the latest from the corporate and Silicon Valley jungles.

"batmobiling" - putting up emotional shields from the retracting armor that covers the batmobile, as in "she started talking marriage and he started batmobiling."

"beepilepsy" - afflicts those with vibrating pagers; characterized by sudden spasms, goofy facial expressions and loss of speech

"betamaxed" - when a technology is overtaken in the market by inferior but better marketed competition, as in "Microsoft betamaxed Apple right out of the market."

"blowing your buffer" - losing your train of thought

"cobweb" - a WWW site that never changes

"elvis year" - the peak year of popularity as in "1993 was Barney the dinosaur's elvis year"

"generica" - fast food joints, strip malls, sub-divisions as in "we were so lost in generica that I couldn't remember what city it was"

"going postal" - totally stressed out and losing it like postal employees who went on shooting rampages

"high dome" - egghead, scientist, PhD

"irritainment" - annoying but you can't stop watching; for example, the O.J. trial

"percussive maintenance" - the fine art of whacking a device to get it working

"prairie dogging" - in companies where everyone has a cubicle something happens and everyone pops up to look

"salmon day" - swimming upstream all day to get screwed in the end

"siliwood" - the coming convergence of movies, interactive TV and computers; also "hollywired"

"square headed girlfriend/boyfriend" - computer

"treeware" - manuals and documentation

"world wide wait" - WWW