Herewith, our 2011 collection of the tech, marketing, and business buzz that bears repeating, as well as the jargon we’ll be deleting from our daily lexicon.

Anacronym (noun)
Definition: A tech acronym too old to remain relevant.
Why we love it: A phrase that blends “anachronism” and “acronym” pleases both our inner wordsmith and our inner geek.

Bacn (noun)
Definition: Spam that you signed up to read.
Why we love it: Because we’ve been dumb enough to opt in far more often than we care to admit. Plus, we love the smell of bacn frying.

Gamification (noun)
Definition: The application of game-design concepts to non-game applications.
Why we love it: Not only is gamification a white-hot way of engaging end users in a more playful—and often more meaningful—way, it’s a great way to rethink the ways in which you communicate with your core audience.

Googleheimer’s (noun)
Definition: A condition that makes your mind draw a blank between the time you think of something to Google then finally get to your computer.
Why we love it: Hey, who hasn’t been there? In fact, even though it was “Urban Word of the Day” just this past spring, we’d forgotten all about the term since it originally surfaced in 2006.

Presenteeism (noun)
Definition: Coming to work when sick—usually motivated by lack of sick days, company culture or fear of job loss.
Why we love it: It’s such a cheery-sounding word for an unhealthy trend!

Quiet car (noun)
Definition: A subway or train car where cell phone conversations are banned.
Why we love it: It reminds us of our peacefully misspent youth, hanging out with other quiet bookworms at the public library.

Shoulder tap (noun)
Definition: A query or informal request made in passing and—per theofficelife.com—a good reason to avoid the boss in the elevator (think Steve Jobs, who it’s rumored would promote or fire someone based on such meetings).
Why we love it: Who hasn’t stammered out a nonsensical reply (or drawn a complete blank) when the top brass casually inquired, “So, what are you working on?”

Workweek creep (noun)
Definition: Work-related tasks that bleed into one’s non-work hours.
Why we love it: No, we’re not crazy about the concept—but the phrase is succinct and accurate. Plus, sadly, more of us can relate to it than ever.

Words and phrases we vow to retire in 2012

• Actionable: We still hate this one, and it’s more rampant than ever.
• End-to-end solution: You can’t solve a business problem if you fix only the middle.
• Moving forward: It’s a silly substitute for “from now on” or “in the future.” And unless you have a time machine, you cannot move elsewhere.
• Reach out to: Unless you’re reviving a ‘70s AT&T ad campaign, please “contact” or “connect with” the other party.
• Wall Street vs. Main Street: We’ve moved on to the “1 vs. 99 percent.” And even that nomenclature is wearing thin.
• World-class: As most things fit into some sort of classification in the order of the world, this is the most meaningless modifier we know. Why isn’t anything “terrific” or “super-duper” anymore?

That’s why I was interested to try out Unsuck-it.com, a site that “unsucks” the “terrible business jargon” that you come across all too often. Jargon like “all-hands,” “baked-in,” and “best-in-class.” As well as explaining the true meaning of these words (“staff meeting,” “part of, included,” and “best,” respectively), the site also offers to email the definition to the person who used it.

I also like WordSpy.com, which documents new words as they become popular. Like “qwerty tummy,” a stomach illness caused by typing on a germ-ridden keyboard … eeww!

Those sites got me thinking of other jargon or popular terms that I’ve come across. Are there others you can think of?

1.    Co-opetition: Vendors believe they can be friends one minute and enemies the next. For instance, they could be business partners and jointly create a piece of technology for one area of the market, but continue to compete in others. It’s often market forces that create co-opetition—you either struggle to challenge the dominant vendor on your own or you get together with your rival and attack together. Better the devil you know, eh?

2.    Eat your own dog food: A company that trusts its products so much that it uses them internally. The term was apparently coined by Microsoft manager Paul Maritz in 1988 when he sent Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager, an email titled “Eating our own dogfood.”

3.    FUD: Some marketers, public relations professionals, and sales executives spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt—mostly about competitors—as a tactic to lure customers to their side. I’ve come across it when Company A accuses Company B of spreading FUD about Company A. Of course Company A would never spread FUD itself. If I had my own company, I would want it to be known as a DUD—a definitively unique developer.

4.    Marketecture: The earliest citation of “marketecture” appeared in Datamation magazine in 1990, according to WordSpy.com. It’s often used by technology journalists to describe a vendor’s technology “architecture” as a neat package of nothing but a marketing slideshow. The architecture is full of promises but empty of shipping products.

5.    Comprehensive solution: Isn’t either “comprehensive” or “solution” redundant when used together? Or do some companies advertise their products as “incomplete solutions?”

6.    Point solution: I’m sure glad your solution has a point to it.

What are your favorites?

1. Advertubing (noun)

Definition: Advertising created specifically for online mediums, a la YouTube.
Why we hate it: If we don’t watch ads on TV anymore, do we really need them on YouTube?

2. Bitch-check (noun, verb)

Definition: The act of asking someone to review a written communication for potentially inflammatory language. “Bill, can you bitch-check this email for me? I don’t want to make David mad.”
Why we love it: It’s much easier to say than, “Can you review this communication for potentially inflammatory language?”

3. Buffering (verb)

Definition: The period of time that you’re technically disabled while learning to use a new technology or device. “Don’t text Chris right now; she has a new phone and she’s buffering.”
Why we love it: With the speed of technology change and the necessity of being wired 24/7, we need a term for this.

4. Squirrel! (interjection)

Definition: From “Up,” one of our favorite movies of 2009, this interjection denotes an abrupt break in thought or attention.
Why we love it: We love the idea of 1. Talking dogs, and 2. Talking dogs as a symbol of our increasingly fractured attention spans.

5. Social netlurking (noun, verb)

Definition: This one comes courtesy of Daily Candy. Spending time on a social network for the sole purpose of stalking a member.
Why we love it: Oh, come on! We all do it. It’s time we put a name on it.

Let’s hark back to a simpler time, before the economy was lamented as much as the weather, when slackers could hide out in forgotten cubicles and devise ever more ways of dodging work, ducking responsibility, and wasting company time.

The following is our jargon tribute to a dying breed: the slackers.

• Arrow shooter: Someone who spits out big ideas, and usually doesn’t act on them
• Matador: Someone skilled at dodging work or responsibility
• Multi-slacking: Keeping a browser window up to conduct personal business, along with a legitimate window, then quickly switching over to the legitimate browser when a manager is near
• Sun lighting: Conducting personal business at work
• Throw it over the wall: Passing something that you don’t want to deal with on to another department

The ocean that touches many shores

Definition: (n, adj) Used as a metaphor for a concept, solution—or even a person—that affects multiple things. “Our CRM solution has many applications for your business; it’s the ocean that touches many shores.”

Why we love it: What’s not to love? It’s visual, it’s green, and it’s global.

Why we hate it: Isn’t it easier to say multipurpose?

But what separates good jargon from bad jargon?  It’s difficult to come up with a definitive rule or principle that can guide your path through the warzone of trite phrases.  So how about a trial-by-fire?  Below is a list of the top 26 words and phrases that should be eliminated from the English language–or, at the very least, eliminated from your vocabulary.  Read them.  Study them.  Excise them.

1| The 80/20 rule (noun)

Definition: a widely adopted principle that 20 percent of something always produces 80 percent of the results. Management guru Joseph Juran expanded the theory, established in 1906 by Italian economist Vilfred Pareto, and now it’s applied it to all kinds of concepts: 20 percent of your sales force will produce 80 percent of your revenue, or 20 percent of your defects will create 80 precent of your problems, and so on.

Why we hate it: Juran’s legitimate management principle is co-opted so often that it’s lost its original meaning, plus it’s often used incorrectly. He recently died at 103, but the theory lives on and on and on.

2| Actionable (adjective)

Definition: subject to or affording ground for an action or suit at law; in business terms, it’s the idea of taking action toward a solution; e.g., “Let’s take actionable steps to solve that issue.”

Why we hate it: Stealing lingo from wordy lawyers? That’s a bad sign.

3| “Ah-ha” moment (noun)

Definition: the moment when you get it: the solution, the realization, the answer

Why we hate it: OK for use in conversation, but don’t write it down; it’s clunky and awkward-looking.

4| Baked in (adjective)

Definition: anything that comes with a product. For example, “the spellchecker is baked into the email program.”

Why we hate it: Our mothers’ brownies have pecans baked into them. Products have features included in them.

5| Bandwidth (noun)

Definition: capacity; e.g., “We don’t have the bandwidth to create that presentation.”

Why we hate it: The darling of dotcommers and techies in the ’90s, this word is past its prime.

6| Brain dump (noun)

Definition: quickly transfer a large body of knowledge from one individual to another. The target, or “dumpee,” could also be a simple object: a piece of paper or its online equivalent, a blog.

Why we hate it: We suppose it’s better to brain dump than brain constipate, but the noun phrase already exists in the English language: “in-depth.” Need to teach someone how do something quickly? You’re talking “in-depth.” Feel like unloading your mind into your online journal? That’s a feature—but it’s also an “in-depth” discussion. You can dump significant others, you can dump your lunch; dump this trite phrase, not your brain.

7| Corner case (noun)

Definition: originally a legitimate engineering term, a corner case refers to a situation that happens when numerous variables occur simultaneously at extreme levels.

Why we hate it: We’re hearing it used to mean “exception to the rule,” but we’d just prefer to hear “exception to the rule.” With that phrase, everyone will know what you’re talking about.

8| Cycles (noun)

Definition: Available time and resources, like “bandwidth.” Use derived from references to computer processing cycles.

Why we hate it: Why do people in the workplace need yet another euphemism to describe capacity? Is it shame? Fear? We really don’t know.

9| Folksonomy (noun)

Definition: derived from “taxonomy,” this cutesy colloquialism used to describe people-driven, collaborative organizational schema such as del.icio.us and flickr, where “plain folks” tag and classify content.

Why we hate it: Two reasons: One, “folk taxonomy” is an existing anthropological concept that may cause confusion. Two, taxonomies rely on established criteria for classification, whereas folksonomies are susceptible to error and caprice.

10| Impact (verb)

Definition: to affect one’s business; e.g., “Savvy marketing can impact your bottom line.”

Why we hate it: We’re not afraid to change with the times, but we were taught that impact is a noun. We’d like to keep it that way.

11| Incentivize (verb)

Definition: business lingo meaning to provide a reason or impetus for someone to do something, to motivate. “The new features will incentivize user participation.”

Why we hate it: Was the English vocabulary so lacking in variety that we needed another to way to say, “encourage?”

12| Leverage (verb)

Definition: use, take full advantage of

Why we hate it: See “impact.” The business world has tried to turn leverage into a verb, but it’s a noun. We continue to fight the good fight.

13| The long tail (noun)

Definition: the opposite of mass market. Economically, it’s where giving consumers highly individualized choices is more valuable than producing hits or blockbusters. For example, three or four big Hollywood movies have huge weekend audiences, whereas Netflix has 55,000 titles and ships one million DVDs every day. See narrowcasting.

Why we hate it: A useful concept that takes a lot of explaining. It also ignores the potential of the long tail: Catering to many niche consumers can be more profitable than pumping out one-size-fits-all products or content.

14| Offline (adverb)

Definition: to move a conversation from a meeting to another time and place; e.g., “Let’s finish our agenda and take that point offline.”

Why we hate it: This phrase saw its spike in the 1990s; now it’s cliché and overused.

15| Optimize (verb)

Definition: to make optimal; to make the most of

Why we hate it: We love the definition, but the word has been appropriated by a lot of folks who want to make “optimizing” sound like black magic and voodoo. It’s not.

16| Out of pocket (adjective)

Definition: unavailable, not able to attend meetings or respond to email. Potential origins of this phrase include accounting (when traveling, business people often pay expenses “out of pocket”) and football (when a quarterback is protected by his team, he is “in the pocket”; when he’s unprotected, he’s “out of pocket”).

Why we hate it: One word is better than three and “unavailable” or “traveling” says it all. Plus colorful phrases should simplify, not confuse.

17| Robust (adjective)

Definition: hardy, vigorous, strongly or stoutly built. When used to describe technology, it generally means a system is resilient to unpredictability or heavy input.

Why we hate it: Now used to describe everything from multiple product features to heavy user activity to exponential growth in market share, the original technical meaning has been lost. This word’s overused–find another one.

18| Siloed (adjective)

Definition: to be segregated, cut off, held separately. IT workers first used this term to describe data isolated in “vertical towers” or “islands” across an organization preventing effective storage, access, or interpretation. Today, siloed has become a fairly common business term applied to any resource monopolized by one part of a company; e.g., “We need those numbers, but they’re siloed in the accounting department.”

Why we hate it: The term is overused, plus it inevitably becomes tangled up in mixed metaphors involving islands, fortresses, or pools.

19| Skillage (noun)

Definition: skills. Used in reference to the abilities of a group or department. For example, “I think Lynn’s group has the skillage to tackle that project.”

Why we hate it: This doesn’t even sound like marketing jargon. It sounds like something you throw in a pan and fry up for breakfast.

20| Socialize (verb)

Definition: to distribute documents such as a presentation, plan, etc. with the goal of building consensus.

Why we hate it: People socialize, PowerPoint presentations do not.

21| Special sauce (noun)

Definition: alluding to burger restaurants having a secret special sauce (i.e. Thousand Island Dressing), this refers to proprietary business information.

Why we hate it: We like our burgers medium-rare with mustard, ketchup and mayo, and we like our jargon to be a lot clearer than this fuzzword.

22| Strategic goals and objectives (noun)

Definition: overall accomplishments that you’d like to achieve

Why we hate it: Why use three words when one will suffice?

23| Surface (verb)

Definition: to bring to light objections or specific problems while discussing a course of action. “The project was presented and the benefits and objections were surfaced.”

Why we hate it: While we applaud the idea of planning ahead and communicating effectively to prevent future problems, the time you’d need to explain what this means could be saved by simply saying “examined.”

24| Sweet spot (noun)

Definition: originally a sports term (the sweet spot of your baseball bat or racket is the spot where the vibration from the impact of the ball is canceled out, so the hitter doesn’t feel any stinging or shaking), the phrase is now applied to business. For example, if you set a price in the sweet spot, you will ensure the best profit.

Why we hate it: Baseball has given us enough clichés. This one’s not a home run.

25| Uplevel (verb)

Definition: corporate-speak for elevating something beyond current capabilities or perceptions

Why we hate it: Those in the corporate world should “uplevel” their thinking and coin a phrase that’s a bit less pompous.

26| WFR-ed (verb, transitive)

Definition: to cease employing; to lay off, usually as a cost-cutting measure; from the acronym for “work force reduction.” For example, “George was WFR-ed last week, so I’m picking up his projects.”

Why we hate it: After a couple of decades of lay-offs, restructuring, and cost cutting, do we really need another euphemism for “getting the boot?”