First, there was Amborse Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, and later, Stan Kelley-Bootle’s computer-related twist, The Devil’s DP Dictionary. Now, Greg Knauss has created The Devil’s Dictionary 2.0, a lovely skewering of terms you’ve heard in the blogosphere (he even dumps on the term blogosphere!). He seems to be adding new entries whenever the inspiration strikes.
Some examples:
Anti-Idiotarian, noun: Idiot. That Eric Raymond is quite an anti-idiotarian.
BigCo, noun: A successful software company.
blogosphere, noun: An poisonous environment of methane, self-satisfaction and other hot gasses. The only creatures that can survive in the blogosphere are low-order molds, able to feed off the waste of others.
flash mob, noun: An impromptu gathering, organized by means of electronic communication, of the unemployed.
This one is my favourite:
social software, noun: Any arbitrary collection of algorithms, protocols and metadata that allows friendless agoraphobics to pretend otherwise. Im having trouble deciding which node in my social software network Im going to ask to the e-prom.
Recommended Reading
Here’s the etymology of the non-word Anti-Idiotarian.
Dave Winer likes to throw around the term BigCo, which is a conglomeration of Big and Company.
One reply on “The Devil’s Dictionary, version 2.0”
That,, “idiotarian”-stuff is just wrong. On many points it’s just a “if you don’t think the US never does anything wrong, you’re an idiot”. Idiot if you belong to soemthing with “socialist” etc in it?
Yeah, for being a land that has been ruled by these idiots called socialists for a long long time, Sweden is not doing bad: http://www.ccsd.ca/pubs/2002/olympic/indicators.htm … and obviously this is what the Swedish population wants, since the socialist/left wing block wins, with 83% voters.
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