The Cloud – The cloud can go rain somewhere else. I’m 100% on Larry Ellison’s side on this one – calling “Cloud Computing” the weak, flabby, nonsense, hype-word-of-the-week that it is. It means nothing, there is no meaning to the phrase “cloud computing.” All it is is noise rattling around in some middle manager’s head, fed in by every electronics trade show this year. Ignore it. And no matter what, if anybody asks, just insist that everything you’ve been doing all along is cloud computing. In fact, you compute cloudier than anybody else!

Friending – How did it become a noun? Now it’s this formal process, thanks to Facebook. We’ve taken making friends, something so basic to human nature that little kids do it – hell, even dogs do it – and turned it into this formalized ritual so we can monitor it and tax it and profit from it. Social networking has taken the joy of friendship and turned it into a sterile mechanical act between robots.

Poke – Sorry, “poke” is something you do after you “peek” on a Commodore computer in BASIC circa 1984. Suddenly “poke” is what two people who have “friended” each other do. Facebook is getting really, really gross.

Monetize – “Making money” just doesn’t seem to be enough; now businesses have to “monetize” everything. Which means making money from some intangible thing that it was formerly impossible to make money from. I don’t have a problem with monetizing per se, it’s just the word. We have to monetize our business, sexitize our relationship, eatitize supper, and peeitize our water closet. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go drinkitize my coffee.

Crowdsourcing – It sounds like what they were doing with the bulldozers at the end of Soylent Green. But actually, it’s just the hip word for “making your customers serve themselves.” Kind of like a buffet, only it’s data instead of food and the diners have to go in the kitchen and cook it too.

Bandwidth – Oh, let’s show everyone how hip we are by taking this tech word that we barely comprehend, and re-deploying it around the cubicle farm. Yeah, we have bandwidth! Do you have enough bandwidth? We’re swimming in bandwidth! But the bandwidth’s so narrow that we can’t bandwidth the bandwidth it would take to bandwidth the process without wasting bandwidth. Wasn’t it hilarious when they were doing this with “byte” back in the ’80s?

Virtualization – Really, isn’t that what computers do? I’m not writing this blog post on parchment with a quill pen; I’m creating a virtual document instead. Later I won’t be fragging my buddies in real time; instead I’ll be sharing a virtual world with them. You know what virtualization is, it’s the new way of saying “virtual reality” without sounding like you’re stuck in 1987.

Pirate – Suddenly everything that’s done on a computer becomes an act of piracy. Look, I just read your press release and Twittered it to my followers, I did not “pirate your news.” Apparently everything you can do with any media not done by a corporation is piracy now. Next time I buy a DVD movie at the store, I’m going to call it “legal piracy.” Maybe after that I’ll ninja your house and John Holmes your girlfriend.

Weekending – Oh my God. It means you’re engaging in a weekend activity! Spare us! Spare us from the weekending people! Die, weekenders! Die quickly, before we can’t sleep without saying we’re “nighting,” go to work without saying we’re “weekdaying,” and, uh, oh God, just go away!

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