Thursday, January 10, 2008

increase your vocabulary

New words I have learned from my daughters in college:

apocolocynposis--the fear of turning into a pumpkin.

pteronophobia--the fear of being tickled by feathers.

sceney--describes a place where people hang to get noticed, as in "Let's not go there, it's become too sceney."

sex positive--a term applied to places of business meaning they are non-discriminatory regarding sexual orientation. "The company I work for is sex positive, our receptionist is a transgender."

transgender-- a man who identifies himself as a woman (transwoman) or a woman who identifies herself as a man (transman)

See how edifying blog reading can be?

UPDATE--two handy phrases learned today in a client meeting led by MBA buccaneer

wetware solution--Attending to a problem via humans (wetware) instead of computers (hardware)

analysis-paralysis--Denigrating term for taking time to consider a project before pushing it forward. As in, Let's not let analysis-paralysis keep us from having a spot on-air right away (but if the campaign bombs it's the agency's fault.)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

wetware solution??? oh jesus. what's wrong with saying "we need people to solve this problem?"

Irene Done said...

"Wetware" IS ridiculous. "Sceney," though, is fun. There's a HRBlock spot running now in which a young man refers to something as being "too spendy." You can hear and read words like that but when you hear them in a spot, it's like they become formal, legitimate OED terms.

Ad Broad, oldest working writer in advertising said...

I almost hate to ask, Irene--what's OED?

Irene Done said...

Oh! Oxford English Dictionary. I meant to go back and type that out but forgot. I'm sorry.

Forgetfulness -- that's one of the problems with wetware.