Sniglets

Sniglets are of course words that should be in the dictionary, but aren’t. See that link and the Wikipedia article, and pay some respect to Rich Hall - he’s a good, funny writer who deserves it.

Anyway, it occurred to me that there’s a few sniglets that are specific to geeks which haven’t been brought up before. See if any of these creep into your vocabulary:

Stupid++ The language you begin to code in at 2 AM when you’re too tired to code anymore. But you want to finish this file, so you keep pushing yourself, and just when you think you’re finished, you discover a huge bug. Then you have to stay up later to fix it, but you’re so tired that you mess up something else even worse. And so on. Trust me, just go to bed. You will remember what to do to fix it in the morning!

Bloggeronni The pasta-like mess you make out of your blog when you try to change all the categories.

Meatloafer This was kind of out there already, but it deserves to be amplified. Meatloaf is equivalent to spam, but it’s from that one friend you have who sends you emails all the time with links to stuff they find funny, so you go to click on it and it’s some lame joke you first saw in 1997. Yes, thank you, we’ve seen Badger Badger Mushroom. And the World According to America. And all the LOLCATS pictures. Even the ones that haven’t been drawn yet.

Googlecheck Typing a word into Google to see if you’re spelling it right.

Riddler-Mail When you get email (usually spam) in a foreign character set that your system doesn’t understand, so the subject line shows up as a line of question marks: ?????????? I’m always tempted to turn on the Bat-signal when I get one of these.

Beer-Blog A post to your blog made while sitting in a bar, in the raw hopes that this will be the one that was good enough to earn some beer - while you’re conveniently right there!

OS-Lag Brief period of disorientation experienced when you switch computers. Especially when you go from your Windows XP at work to your Mac at home, or your Windows Vista to your girlfriend’s Ubuntu, and start trying to look for things in the menu that aren’t there, type commands for DOS in Bash, Bash commands in DOS, and so on.

PhiloSEOphy The philosophy of Search Engine Optimization. We know 90% of the conventional wisdom is bunk, the rest is questionable, but get two webmasters together and we still can’t help but babble theories about meta-tags and keyword counts. What it is, is astrology for geeks.

FiredFox When the Firefox browser suddenly freezes solid and you have to kill it manually, hence “firing” it.