Monday, June 05, 2006

Techworld vocab lessons

In my new, non-journalism line of work, I've been exposed to a whole new realm of jargon. Instead of nut grafs (the part of the story where you boil everything down to its essence, i.e., the point) and promos (the things at the top of page 1 that whip to stories inside and sometimes below) and whip (tell people to go here).
Now, it's words like:

blocker (what it sounds like -- something to keep you from completing a task)

synch up (people sharing info -- a term I knew best for devices)

bandwidth (how much a person can take on, i.e., instead of saying "I have too much on my plate," you say "I don't have the bandwidth to do that.")

blocker (something to keep you from getting a task completed)
but there are a couple I needed help with:

mezzanine level (a theater-ish metaphr, i.e., not as up close and detailed as we need, but workable -- comes up in the context of, say, computer files that aren't quite in the form we want)

skunkworks (the messy, "stinky" early going process when all hands are working to get a project rolling)

And there are probably other words that have started dropping into my conversation without me even knowing it. Which is kind of fun, just 'cause it's different.
Next step: making up my own jargon and spreading it around

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