As the Networked World continues to define and influence the business environment, there is a need, evolving in parallel, for language to describe the new memes. The website Wordspy, which came to my attention courtesy of my friend Elif Beall of Brand Neutral, does a great job of crawling the web for fresh lexicon. As a longtime Thesaurus junkie with a Scrabble habit, I found Wordspy to be a very cool resource. So maybe a Scrabbler can’t score with words like ‘requel’ (a film that shares subject matter with previous films in a series) or ’staycation’ (a stay-at-home vacation). There’s a river of language flowing through the Networked World. Wordspy helps keep it fresh.
Wordspy inspired me to coin a few words myself, to describe concepts and behaviors that currently (that I know of) have no word of their own:
Alf – a well-paid puppet of one’s boss; often known for humoring others with corny one-liners.
Bisoxual – someone whose ‘thing’ is wearing mismatched socks.
Braindulgent – putting up with a smart employee whose upside barely outweighs the downside.
Bacon – To calculate your degrees of separation from someone you don’t know. i.e. “I baconed Eva Mendez. Three, dude. Eva Mendez is just three links away.”
Idealob – An attempt to save a bad business scenario with a dramatic move.
Ganeschtick – Hindu humor.
Jockonomy – The whimsical and super-scaled economies that surround world class pro athletes. The jockonomy (and jockonomics) make possible businesses who sell over-sized furniture and build homes with 12 car underground garages, indoor skeet ranges and recording studios with hidden memorabilia vaults.
Jollybobbing – Bobbing one’s head in time to a tune on one’s iPod or headphones.
Lapelification – Labeling oneself and others what one wears on one’s lapel.
Lincolnated – Stiff and rehearsed, a performance repeated verbatim, like the Mr. Lincoln audio-animatronic at Disneyland.
Looneyverse – What people inhabit who get obnoxiously loud during mobile phone conversations in crowded public places like elevators and subways.
Meegle – To look up your own name on a search engine.
Meesult – The results of looking up your name on a search engine.
Monologorrhea – The tendency to run at one’s mouth for long periods of time for purposes of demonstrating one’s facility with language, establishing thought leadership, and/or/perhaps enhancing one’s status within the group, when in reality what one is actually doing is covering up one’s insecurities, sucking the life out of one’s scene, boring one’s audience and giving one’s fellow players no choice but to edit one out of the scene at their first opportunity.
Nightshading – Wearing sunglasses at night.
Nuggetize – Distilling large bodies of knowledge into their most useful gems or ‘nuggets’ of insight, as for a PowerPoint presentation.
Oprahsize – Operating productively at the largest scale of entrepreneurship, as Ted Turner, Richard Branson or Oprah.
Polysume – Multiple versions of one’s resume designed to apply for different types of jobs.
Spooferate – To liberate by spoofing as the Colombians recently did with the FARC hostages, and William Holden did with the POWs in Stalag 17.
Sweepscraper – A bot that locates and auto-enters one in online contests and sweepstakes. I don’t know if it exists but it oughta.
Tattistic – Attracted to others based exclusively on their tattoos or other body art; the tattoo/body art demographic.
Tederated – A performance geared toward the 20 minute, highly-stylized presentation format of the TED Conference.
Troglodate – A date with a troglodyte.
Ultiweigh – To insist on having the last word in a scene, to ‘weigh in’ last. Most typically used by the highest-status person in a scene, and most often an unproductive move. “Why should I offer up my best stuff? The V.P. will ultiweigh whatever I say anyway.”
Wowfactoring – Counting on a big idea to attract attention to a campaign or brand. Often a desperation move that results in a weak idealob.
Tags: Bonifer, Changeology, Dialogue, GameChangers, Idiom, Language, Lexicon, Networked World