Language Log

An anonymous correspondent reaches out (cf. "May I ask you a question?" [6/12/17]):

So, from one jargonista to another: here’s a frustrating set of related neologisms, again from my increasingly confused and pathetic campus administration:

We’ve gone from “interdisiplinary” and “crossdisciplinary” to “multidisciplinary”, but the new buzzword on our campus is “transdisciplinary” (not sure if hyphens are used in some cases). Our entire campus is trying to recluster itself around 5 key “Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence”, of all things.

Perhaps not worth analyzing, but a deplorable sign of the times, when academic institutions are focused on “branding”.

In response to "May I ask you a question?" (6/12/17), we've been having an energetic discussion about the origins and meaning of the expression "reach out", culminating (as of this moment) in Nick Kaldis' good question:

This topic causes an interesting related neologism to come to mind: when did “outreach” come into currency? Our campus has, for instance, a “Community Outreach” office.

I missed Heather McHugh's poem "Hackers can sidejack cookies" — a collage of fragments from the Jargon File — when the New Yorker published the text in 2009. Here's the author reading it at B.U. on 4/17/2010:

A friend of mine who works in the Federal government recently received an email posing this rhetorical question:

How do agencies mitigate risks and achieve FedRAMP compliance in multi-tenant environments to successfully pave their way to the cloud?

He naturally wondered whether there can ever be a paved road leading to a cloud. And I naturally wondered how anyone could get paid for writing jargon-laden garbage as bad as this. We can but wonder.

(I actually live in a multi-tenant environment. It's great; all the other tenants are lovely people. But I'm not sure whether I am FedRAMP-compliant. I hope I am.)

British comedian Richard Herring is the author of a 2003 book entitled Talking Cock: A Celebration of Man and his Manhood, so he naturally seized upon the republicization opportunity provided by the recent story of the world's first successful penis transplant. He made it the topic of his weekly humor column in The Metro, the trashy free newspaper that I sometimes reluctantly peruse in my constant search for linguistic developments that might be of interest to Language Log readers.

In a bravura display of diversity of lexical choice, Herring contrived to use a different euphemism for the anatomical organ every time he could find an excuse for mentioning it, which, believe me, was a lot. And he left me pondering a serious lexicographical question: just how many euphemisms are there for the appendage in question?

[Unusually, this post is restricted to adult males. Please click "Read the rest of this entry" to confirm that you are male and over 18.]

When I was a student at Dartmouth (1961-1965), from around mid-December to mid-March, we had roughly three feet of snow on the ground much of the time, but then came the big melt, and we called it the "schlump" season.  The paths across campus were so muddy that the buildings and grounds crew placed "duck boards" on the ground for us to walk on.