The Null Device

BBC News Magazine has a piece on subversions of office jargon:

Enough with all this blue sky thinking in the workplace. Not just because the phrase is yet another example of meaningless office twaddle. But because it is time for some red sky thinking, the signal, in these darkening autumn days, that it is nearly time to go home.

A polidiot is someone promoted beyond their abilities thanks to their political skills. How to spot them? Well, they will be the ones testiculating - waving their arms around while talking nonsense. Often supported by a backing singer, that familiar person in a meeting who doesn't contribute their own ideas but just nods along with the boss.

But spare a thought for Valerie; hard at work, but baffled. At her office, the mission is to herd the dinosaurs to the right end of the cricket green. What does it mean? She has no idea.

¶ culture jargon language subversion 0

One of the Memepool people has drawn up a table of buzzword prefixes and suffixes, (i.e., "pod-", "mo-" and "blue", and "-casting", "-ster" and "-zilla"), and filled in the squares with definitions of the buzzwords that currently exist, speculative definitions of concepts that may one day exist, and the obligatory "exists but isn't called that" squares:

• wikijacking: replacing wiki stuff with your content en masse
• modating: surely they are doing this in japan
• netcasting: fish procurement technology

Some of the empty squares suggest definitions; i.e., "friendblogging" could be either going on about mundane details of one's life that only concern those who know the author, or possibly LiveJournal-style friends-only blogging with social-network authentication.

(via The Fix) ¶ humour jargon tech 2