What's the word

Every organization has its own vocabulary.

Arriving in the bay area at the height of the Bubble I can vividly remember my first impressions. I left the frozen tundra north of the 49th to join high flying Ariba whose parking lot resembled a new car dealership, complete with cell phone-wielding sales guys. Not a week went by when someone didn't drive in with something shiny & new or better yet had it delivered. Favorite test fright... a colleague's new Viper.

Truthfully the materialism didn't bother me, I'd brought my own pick and shovel to this latest gold rush. What really puzzled me was the language everyone used. Product managers spoke about leveraging assets and wanted to benchmark everything. And then came prepone (ref). I'd never come across the word and thought it sounded silly, but more importantly it was used in the fictional context of advancing the release date of software (and that certainly never happened at Ariba). Hearing it, a dev manager sardonically asked if by releasing on schedule we'd be poning the release.

Krillion too has developed its own language liberally sprinkled with search/ad-related acronyms (SEO, SEM, CPM, RPM, PPC) and a few real gems we all enjoy.

By definition, our favorite word, canonical (ref), is in a class by itself ;-) There are canonical URLs (oops URIs), product-identifiers and even a T-shirt. We delight in finding new ways to work this into the conversation, and non-developers get approving looks if we manage to use it correctly from Van and Roger.

Then there is trifurcate (ref). I offered this up one day tongue-in-cheek discussing a UI problem that had, surprise... three solutions. It doesn't lend itself to easy usage and in that sense it's rather canonical.

Paul gave us accretion (ref) in response to Van annexing some of the common space between them with his technical library which had been gathering dust in his basement and now is gathering dust on our bookshelves. As our QA lead, Paul is the team's conscience and he specializes in accreting bugs in Jira.

It will take time for new words to gain the support necessary to rise to the pantheon of usage occupied by the big three, but we have candidates. Joel casually offered vicissitudes (ref) during our last all-hands and judging by the impression it made on the assembly it might rate a T-shirt of its own one day. That is if the venal (ref) fortunes of its rivals don't win out, quietly rendering it moot (which might qualify as mute).

Anyway, if you come across this post and have some good examples of words that define your company let us know. We know this linguistic experience is not canonical.

Comments

[zeldman]

Do phrases count? I worked at an ad agency where a very pale account guy talked about "black marketing," by which he meant, appealing to an African-American demographic.