Jarjargon
Some favorites from
Jargon Scout:
emailingering
Another submission from Faisal Jawdat, who credits a co-worker for coining the term. It's pronounced "e-malingering." Emailingering describes a particular and common style of avoiding getting anything done at work, using your computer and the Internet as both cause and justification. Here is Jawdat's more fully elaborated definition.
Emailingering is a work-shirking method where one claims and believes that by:
- being physically present (in the chair), and
- occasionally talking to other people (especially if you can find something to tell them to do, whether or not it makes sense), and
- spending time senselessly decorating Powerpoint presentations that will be used only for internal discussion (advanced e-mailingerers will actually use powerpoint as a writing tool so that they can quadruple the amount of time it takes to get something down on paper by playing with shadows and fade effects before finally writing something that will be printed out, and
- investing a large amount of time tickling numbers in Microsoft Project to make highly detailed schedules that bear only passing resemblance to reality on the surface (and none at all on the detail level),
one is being an important contributor despite spending upwards of 85% of one's time engaged in
- web browsing ("but I'm reading relevant stuff!") and
- goofing off in email (having Really Important Discussions in slow motion as opposed to just making a decision).
A key to emailingering is that the more you do, the more email you produce, which means that your fellow emailingerers will fill up your inbox with their own emailingering-generated fluff. For this reason emailingerers like to travel in herds.
post-economic
When a person acquires sufficient wealth to retire -- when working becomes optional -- that person is said to have gone post-economic. The dollar figure is subjective, different for every person. Being post-economic is beyond buying the car of your choice, beyond building the house of your dreams. Brad DeLong has surmised that each person's post-economic point (he didn't use that term) can be calculated by multiplying his or her current level of consumption by three. (See here and search for "satiation." Thanks to Dan Kohn for the cite.)
Other terms exist for the condition. In Neal Stephenson's Cryptnomicon, one of the characters kept a little app running on his desktop to calculate and display in real-time the value for what he called f***-you money, defined as that sum of money which will allow you to say the above phrase, but unbowdlerized, to your boss.
The term post-economic might be favored in conversations about the philanthropic and socially worthwhile initiatives undertaken by those with newly sufficient means. F***-you money would be used in rougher contexts, such as the impulse to acquire a different classic car to drive for each day of the week.
Paul Komar wrote in to suggest that, in preference to uttering the above dangerous phrase to your boss, you can just call in rich. Komar notes, "It's nicer, and potentially more permanent."
entreprenerd
Roger Whitehead pointed out an article, no longer online, in the British daily newspaper The Guardian that uses the term entrepenerd to describe people who start up or assist in the startup of Internet businesses. Whitehead notes that the tone of the article indicates that the author did not invent the term.
jarjar
Tom Whore offers this timely intransitive verb, with extensions as adjective and noun.
1. To add avatars or constructs to something as padding and/or in a superfluous manner.
The new MSWord 2000 is so jarjared it takes me an hour to get a memo done up.
2. To be a superfluous part of something.
I have to jarjar at the trade show next week.
Who's the jarjar giving this demo?
* Ray, 1/08/2004 01:42:55 PM
