In our never-ending quest to make you more successful and happy in your job, we bring you the latest Silicon Valley jargon guide, so that you too may pepper your conversations with just the kind of neologisms that get swapped over lattes in the Peninsula area. If you are describing someone putting up emotional shields, try saying batmobiling instead, from the retracting armor that covers the Batmobile in the current movie franchise, as in she started talking marriage and he started batmobiling. When a technology is overtaken in the market by inferior but better marketed competition, we say it has been betamaxed, as in Microsoft betamaxed Apple right out of the market. Losing your train of thought is nicely encapsulated by blowing your buffer. A peak year of popularity for a trend or phenomenon is Elvis year, as in 1993 was Barney the Dinosaur’s Elvis year. A handy way to describe all the interchangeable fast food joints, strip malls, and subdivisions that turn so much of America into a homogeneous continuity is generica, as in We were so lost in generica that I couldn’t remember what city it was. A high dome is of course an egghead, scientist, PhD type; irritainment is a good word for something annoying you can’t stop watching i.e. the O.J. trial; meatspace is of course the physical (as opposed to the virtual) world (also carbon community, facetime, F2F (face to face) and RL (real life). We’ve all reverted to percussive maintenance at some point, the fine art of whacking a device to get it working. Finally, we really like this one, which describes so many a work day for all of us – salmon day, for those times you seem to spend all day swimming upstream – just to get screwed in the end.
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