Category: Word on the Street

Very Low Food Security – This, ladies and gentleman, believe it or not, is the new government euphemism for “hunger.” This is how we got rid of hunger in America. We renamed it.

Saw this on the news tonight and thought it deserved a “Word on the Street” all its own. Those who drafted this Ag. Dept. report and coined this abomination really deserve to choke on their chalupa and die. For more information, see my old STIM piece: “This Shit Doesn’t Stink, It Exceeds the Odor Threshold.”

The Cloud – Synonym for the Internet. Coined because of all those network illustrations in books that frequently show the Internet in a network topology as one of those grade-school-simple clouds.

AMVs – Short for “Anime Music Videos,” amateur videos that take excerpts from Japanese anime and mash them together with a popular piece of music. The term has been around for a while but YouTube has made them all the rage.

Ratpacking – Gangbanger term for swarming the target of a gang assault using mobile phones and two-way pagers to coordinate the attack.

Floats – The latest in painfully annoying advertising; those little ad boxes that hover above the content and won’t go away until you dismiss them. Especially insidious because they’re not separate windows but part of the Javascript code within the underlying page (thereby bypassing pop-up blocking tech).

Limbaugh Slang for Viagra or any other Erectile Dysfunction drugs. Originated in the porn biz.

Ratpacking Gangspeak for using mobile phones, PDAs, and other mobile comms to coordinate a drive-by or other swarm-style attack.

Random Shutdown Syndrome (RSS) Term coined by disgruntled Apple MacBook owners for the tendency of some of the new mobile Macs to intermittently shut down.

Wiimen Growing tongue-in-cheek slang for “women,” especially female gamers, used in online chat. Let’s hope this doesn’t catch on, but we may be seeing more of it as the Nintendo Wii comes to market, and thanks to the growing ranks of female gamers, which according to a recent Neilsen study, now well outnumber men in online game, at 64%

Two new/recent coinages to point out:

Zuned – it’s what happens when you lose all of your digital music due to a glitch in DRM software. Coined by Michael Robertson, anti-DRM spokesbot and founder of MP3.com, creator of Lindows/Linspire, and the Skype competitor SIPphone. Robertson predicts the Zune is going to be the biggest tech flop of ’07. Read the piece on Robertson’s blog. Robertson also coined “ScrewedForSure” for “PlayForSure,” Microsoft’s DRM technology.

Netcast – Not coined by Leo Laporte, but a term he’s now trying to promote to replace “podcast.” He believes (and we agree) that the POD part is misleading to newbies (who think you need an iPod to listen) and now that Apple’s legal goons are going after people for using POD in products and services, it’s as good a time as any to make the switch to something more universal. Read the TUAW piece about this.