Only mildly OT for this thread:
chicagotribune.com
Slang reveals our glee over
dot-coms becoming dot-bombs
By Marja Mills
Tribune staff reporter
Published August 14, 2001
The tech sector may not have hit bottom just yet,
according to some analysts, but then, neither has
dot-coinage.
Last week, for example, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems Inc., said he
didn't believe the industry had reached its low point yet, but might do so later this
year.
If that is the case, there are any number of snide, even gleeful, references to
dot-com demise awaiting the failure of other tech businesses.
No longer are failed dot-coms referred to simply as "dot-bombs," a term that
became popular as soon as the tech industry hit the skids last year. A new
vocabulary of e-doom is expanding to describe the continuing troubles of the
industry.
Much of the linguistic backlash is aimed at dot-com millionaires and their ilk. You
know the kind: those smug young entrepreneurs once riding high with their
start-ups, their stock options, their starter castles.
"I think people get a lot of pleasure tweaking the noses of these young
entrepreneurs, or `entrepre-nerds,' " said Paul McFedries, a writer and computer
expert who tracks new terms on his Word Spy Web site.
"They thought they had the world, the whole idea that everything was going to be
nothing but up for the next 20 years. I think a lot of people who have been around
the business cycle a few times were laughing at them and now are making fun of
them, linguistically at least."
Web firms are reported to have gone not belly up but "sneakers up," a reference
to the youth of staffs that padded around in rumpled khakis and gym shoes.
Maybe, some writers suggest, they have gotten their "dotcom-uppance."
McFedries added those terms to his Web site's compilation of new words a few
months ago.
You can almost hear the glee in some of the terms regularly being coined these
days to describe the "dot-carnage" that has come with the "tech wreck," the
sharp downturn in fortunes.
McFedries said he has coined a term of his own, "anti-buzzword," to describe the
twists on buzzwords.
"It pokes fun at the existing buzzword," McFedries, 41, said of such dot-com
anti-buzzwords as "dot-bomb" and "dot-goner," "dot-coma" and "dot-compost,"
"start-downs" and "not-coms." All are variations on Web businesses that flop.
Some of those emerged soon after the tech sector took a nosedive. Others arose
alongside the continuing culture of misery for those who dreamed of grandeur and
instead got pink slips. Many are finding it hard to land new positions they want.
In the new e-vocabulary, "b2b" still means business-to-business commerce. But
it also can mean "back to banking" as in the bricks-and-mortar jobs some of the
would-be tycoons had to resume. A worse fate is "b2m," meaning
"back-to-mom," for those recent and not-so-recent grads who no longer can afford
a place of their own.
The origin of many of these terms is hard to trace. Some probably spring from
business writers, others from the amateur wordsmiths who make a point of trying
to come up with new terms that will catch on.
And then there are all the computer users who grew up with the technology and
are naturals at playing with e-language. Many are at their keyboards,
"dot-commiserating" about their economic fate.
"I think the chat rooms and instant messaging is a source of a lot of this stuff,"
McFedries said. "Because of the nature of [writing on-line], they have to be short
and playful."
There's dot-commiserating and then there's dot-dissing.
Too bad for the "dot snots," the arrogant dot-com founders who flaunted their
status and cut an obnoxious figure in Silicon Valley.
(Of course, there are plenty of perfectly nice dot-com millionaires. But they're not
the ones who people love to hate. At least not as much.)
Working from his home office in Toronto, McFedries trolls mainstream
newspapers and magazines, trade publications and the World Wide Web for new
terms to include on his Web site for word watchers
(www.logophilia.com/wordspy).
Enough time has passed since the tech troubles began, McFedries said, that
word watchers and dictionary editors are beginning to spot which terms are likely
to have staying power and which have failed to catch on.
"Dot-bomb is probably one of the most popular," McFedries said. "I see that one
all over the place."
"Dotcom-uppance" is gaining ground, too. "You're starting to see that one in
various places," McFedries said. "It started out being just a coinage but now it
has found its linguistic legs."
By contrast, "dot-coma" and "dot-compost" seem destined for the giant trash
heap of terms that get coined but not used. "They're almost too clever,"
McFedries said. "It's the ones that dovetail perfectly with the original phrase that
seem to last. `Not-com' is a good rhyme. `Dot-bomb.'"
One of the terms McFedries spotted most recently to post on his Web site is
"u-turn effect." That is "what employees do who went from old economy jobs to
new economy jobs and now are trying to slink back into those old jobs," he said.
McFedries predicted the linguistic backlash against once-smug dot-commerswill
produce another new term, yet to be coined.
It will be a variation on the German word, schadenfreude, meaning to take
pleasure in the misfortune of others, he said. Only this one will be the concept of
schadenfreude as it applies specifically to Web entrepreneurs.
"I'm sure someone will come up with a word for that," McFedries said. He will be
watching for it. |
