Jargon Watch
Architecture Police
An individual or group within a company that makes sure software and hardware development follows established corporate guidelines. The architecture police also rein in excessively creative development efforts in conservative organizations.
Bitslag
All the useless rubble on the Net one has to plow through to get to the rich information ore.
CEOP-phobia
The male fear of peeing while standing next to one's CEO at a urinal.
Disk Dancers
Teenagers who use the AOL disks given away in magazines and via direct mail to hop from one free account to another.
Going Cyrillic
When a graphical display (LED panel, bit-mapped text and graphics) starts to display garbage. "The thing just went Cyrillic on me."
Panic Merchants
Businesses, media outlets, and morality groups that make their living by capitalizing on common fears and anxieties. AIDS, escalating crime, ecological degradation, porn on the Internet, and antisocial rap lyrics are some of the fears exploited by panic merchants.
Router droppings
The inclusions added to e-mail messages when a server or recipient cannot be found. Cryptic and foul-looking, they require a kind of scatological analysis to find what the router problem was. Also called "daemon droppings."
- Gareth Branwyn (jargon@wiredmag.com)
A tip o' the lamp shade to Elliot Sobel, Tyson Vaughan, Mikki Halpin, Alberto Gaitan, and Tom Kelleher.
