lingo lingoing lingone

Tuesday, oct. 3, 2006   |   0 comments

I’ve had a number of job interviews these past weeks at a number of different internet companies, and as such, there’s been a whole lot of lingo-talk going on. “Best practices” and “proof of concept” (or just “PoC”)…“message” used as a verb.

It brings to my mind this thing I wrote back in the late 90s for a big purple book about ladies in technology. It was a sidebar piece about what it was like working on the internet, specifically a purported new wave of office jargon, all of which I completely made up. Like I claimed that conference rooms across the e-nation were abuzz with people saying things like “add that to shopping cart” (meaning “let’s definitely greenlight that project”) or “we’ve got too many windows open” (meaning “the meeting has descended into far too many sub-conversations and needs to get back on topic”). I think I even used “view source” (“let’s find out more about what it takes to make that work”) and “flatten layers” (“merge everyone’s feedback into one core mission statement”).

It was never entirely clear if the book’s editors knew it was supposed to be funny or what, but for years I felt sort of guilty about the whole thing. Though, after the book came out, my office did start to sort of joke-seriously use the “add to shopping cart” one, and even “too many windows open.” So in a sense, my piece wasn’t made up after all. Total PoC!