I've been trying for 20 years to add a buzzword to the ever-growing lexicon on technology terminology. When people were first using their home PCs for work-related chores, I coined the term "no-collar worker." Did you care? No. Like everyone else, you settled on the far duller moniker, telecommuter. It sounds like somebody who lives on Earth and works on the Starship Enterprise.

And just last year, in a PC World.com blog, I introduced the word arroware, meaning arrogant software that takes over your computer. Have you heard it? I didn't think so.

Okay. I haven't given up. Here are a few new buzzwords, expressions, and acronyms that English-speaking techies desperately need. Please sprinkle them into your conversations. Not only will you impress your co-workers with your up-to-the-minute vocabulary, but you'll make my mother proud.

Adofluorescent: A teenager whose complexion reveals that he or she spends too much time in front of a monitor.

Apples and Oranges: A really good, extensive music collection filled with songs that are not all compatible with the same MP3 player.

Binary Erotica: Sexually-oriented content found on the Internet that you personally enjoy, and therefore cannot be described as cyberporn.

Clean Kitchen Phenomenon: A good situation that can't last. For example, you turn on your PC and Windows boots properly. You load two or three programs and they run without problems. You download and install a new application. Still no problems. It's only a matter of time.

Constant of Camera Inconsistency: The certainty that your new digital camera will not be able to use the flash cards you purchased for any of your previous digital cameras.

Featuredrop: The tendency to promise cool bells and whistles in the product announcement that aren't there when the product actually ships.

Flasher: A person who exposes to the public bits of himself that should remain private by placing personal information on an unencrypted flash drive.

FLT: A TLA (three-letter acronym) that stands for "four-letter TLA".

Googlegaggle: A group of web sites offering assorted services for free and hoping to one day be very, very profitable.

HIBABHEP!: What you say when you're buying inkjet cartridges. It stands for "Help! I'm Being Accosted By HewlEtt-Packard!"

IIIIOOOUU: The sound you make after you realize that you removed a USB hard or flash drive without properly stopping it.

Information Tollbooth: The plan by major ISPs to charge domains for improved access. The opposite of Net Neutrality.

Maxwell Smart: A user with a special talent for getting his computer infected with spyware. It's for users like that that IS departments are attempting to develop the Cone of Silence.

MISTY: The act of men proving their masculinity by showing off their cell phones, cameras, and PDAs. It stands for "Mine is Smaller Than Yours".

Mobile Human: A person with a cell phone, camera, PDA, flash drive, external hard drive, and MP3 player. Usually comes equipped with an insufficient number of pockets.

Mousepaw: That pain in your right wrist.

Net Neuterology: The plan by major ISPs to charge domains exorbitant fees for content of which they don't approve.

Net Numerology: The plan by major ISPs to make sure the numbers forecast a profitable future for them instead of for us.

Nyetwork Protocol: The absolute, irrefutable fact that at least one computer on your local network won't see at least one other computer on the same network.

Padded Cellmate: Someone who never appears in public without a cell phone attached to their ear.

P-Mail: A legacy technology involving physical objects delivered via the Post Office. Very often, p-mail consists of one or more pieces of paper folded and inserted into another, specialized piece of paper called an envelope-a term the Post Office apparently took from e-mail terminology. This type of physical-pieces-of-paper-in-paper mail can, for short, be called p-p-p-p-mail.

PQOS: Patch quilt operating system. A Windows installation with so many security updates that there is no original code left. A Windows installation.

Ring Groan: The sound you make when someone's cell phone goes off in an inappropriate location.

S9am: Unsolicited commercial e-mail whose subject contains intentionally misspelled words.

Schizophonia: The condition of appearing to be talking to yourself and therefore mentally unbalanced. Usually caused by a Bluetooth headset.

Still Perfect: Any program that people are talking about but is not yet available. Vaporware. As in "Microsoft Windows Vista is still perfect, but wait until it comes out."

TFCEMAOTM: The fastest chip ever made-as of this month. The performance difference between a TFCEMAOTM and a LMFCEM (last month's fastest chip ever made) is clearly visible to anyone with a stopwatch and great reflexes.

USC: Universal Serial Cuss. What you do when you discover that the 11 USB ports on the back of your PC aren't enough.

Wareabouts: The various places on your hard drive where programs have hidden bits of themselves.

WOM: Write-only memory. Where the data goes when your computer crashes after three hours working on an important report that you didn't bother to save to disk. Or when your hard drive crashes six months after your last backup. Every computer has an infinite amount of WOM.

WOMbat: Someone who hasn't backed up their hard drive in six months, and has just realized that all of their files have been irretrievably moved into WOM.

© Copyright 2006 by Lincoln Spector