We don’t use words because they mean something. They mean something because we use them.

Back in the 1990s, a colleague and I manage to get the “Performance Enterprise Network Information System” project endorsed and launched across a team of several hundred people. Someone remarked it was a bit of a mouthful. We were very proud.

I love how easy it is to change language

You can really just make up words, the more ambiguous the better, and people will assign meaning to them and start using them

I visit other people’s offices from time to time as part of my job. I take every opportunity I can get to sneak into unused meeting rooms to draw a comprehensively labelled Actualising Hexagon Methodology on the whiteboard for others to find

Welcome to corporate life, where everything is bullshit.

Usually I hear those corpo bullshit terms and just zone out. Nothing of value is going to follow so it doesn’t matter. Not worth my time.

They are the people who could be replaced with an LLM at no loss, you could also replace them with a kitten for +8 to staff morale.

Manager: This idea for the project is so fetch.

Manager: If it’s not fetch then get fetch.

Programmer: Which repo are we git fetch ing?

Genius. I’d love to see the rest of this guy’s idea fridge.

This is essentially how living language works.

Gay meant showy and carefree as in we’ll have a gay ol’ time! In the late 19th and early 20th centuries gay became a euphemism for fellows who liked the company of other men for romance instead of women, as those dudes were, well, a bit queer, and it wasn’t polite to talk about such things in mixed company. People in the mlm category often expressed showiness and had a carefree (family-light) lifestyle and so other conversants generally caught on.

Heck, there’s kind of a euphemism revolution going on in social media since posts and comments can commonly be flagged for talking about delicate subjects, and keywords can draw the notice of uninvited readers (and put people on watch lists). Hence suicide becomes unlife, rape becomes grape, Israel becomes Is-not-so-real and so on.

Recently, a correspondent started using blood libel as a noun referring to those outrageous MAGA lies used to demonize outgroups, such as They’re eating the dogs! It’s much the way the original blood libel was an accusation against Jewish folk (used by the Nazis, but it didn’t originate with them). I picked it up quickly.

(Blood libels are more effective if they’re implausible since they serve for costly signaling. By chirping out one in conversation, a MAGA signals their nature to other MAGA while sounding unhinged to anyone else.)

When I read let’s triangle back on that I interpreted it to mean, going back to the desk to verify facts and develop the idea, stopping in the lunch room for a snack, and coming back to the next meeting, well prepared. That makes sense to me.

The idea refrigerator sounds like what someone might suggest if they don’t know the expression to table that [idea] for now. Greenbeards sonetimes get confused by tabling used as a verb. I think it’s unintuitive.

This dude’s new lexicon may have been random, but we human beings are so good at constellationing (seeing intent and skill in simple video-game AI) that we’ll find meaning in word salad by inference and intuition.

(It’s also how Trump can spout gibberish and his base reads it as four-dimensional chess. Those of us more savvy, recognize a fast talk and flim-flam when we see it, sometimes from the experience of being fooled by confidence ploys before.)

Reminds me of a favorite I heard recently:

9 women can’t have a baby in a month.

That’s why you need autistic people in a team.

“Idea fridge” seems easy enough to get

deleted by creator