Weekend buzzwords

It's the weekend, and for those who speak in business buzzwords Monday through Friday, days off can be difficult. No boss or officemates around for you to dazzle with the latest neologism—usually one that's ugly and conveys little. To keep you from suffering the verbal equivalent of the bends, here are some words you can use for weekends. They'll keep those buzzword muscles in shape until you can get back to full-scale training on Monday.

Getting up=Offbedding
Brushing teeth=Posthalitosisizing
Blowing nose=Outsnotting
Eating=Preplumping
Exercising=Upmuscling
Bathing=Disgriming
Washing windows=Streakifying
Cutting grass=Downshearing
Trimming trees=Delimbinating
Running errands=Merchant lapping
Napping=Incouchification

Please share your own. We can build a whole new dictionary of meaningless phrases. Oh, wait, American business has done that already.

Two words to retire

Every now and then, words blast out of the lexicon and elbow their way into every article, blog, or tweet. Within weeks, their welcome is worn out because they're pushing other and perhaps more colorful words to the sidelines. With the speed of communication today, a word can become a cliche in about 48 hours.

My two candidates for the Boy-I'm-Really-Sick-of-These-Words Award are iconic and snarky. Chrysler and GM are iconic corporations that build iconic brands with iconic nameplates. I can live with that, I guess, but now I'm also reading every day about iconic TV shows. Iconic movies. Iconic foods. Iconic style. Even iconic sunglasses and lipstick shades. Not to be iconoclastic, but I bet we can stumble along with other words. Popular, perhaps, or well-known, or even beloved.

When someone recently referred to something I'd written as snarky, I thought it was relatively descriptive. But suddenly I have so much company in Snarkville that I'm thinking of moving out. Anything that's a little snide, a little sarcastic, a little cynical, is now snarky. I like having a choice. Will I be sardonic today? Or caustic? Sassy? Mocking? Maybe derisive or supercilious. But not snarky. Not anymore.

Let's all get out our thesauruses (I love that word; for me it always conjures up a really erudite dinosaur who wears thick glasses) and find some apt replacements for words that have lost their zing.

Getting closer to Back Again to Me

Yesterday, the interior of my seventh book/first novel was sent to me to download and proof. I'm finding some proofing errors, but that's fixable little stuff. The big stuff is that putting out fiction feels so much more self-revelatory than publishing nonfiction. With nonfiction, people may take issue with your facts, your conclusions, even your style, but with fiction, if they hate the book, it feels as if they are taking issue with your very own soul (so far, no one has hated it, but I'm bracing for the day). Although this book isn't autobiographical in any way, it is something that came out of my imagination and my heart--not my research or someone else's research, and somehow sending this book into the world feels a lot more scary. Also a lot more exciting. It won't be long now.