language

Now De-“Classified”

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It wasn’t really “classified.” Just FOUO. But now it isn’t even that, so I’m pleased to present (even though I’m probably late to the game here) excerpts the NSA’s “Unofficial Vocabulary.”

DAY LADY: A mildly pejorative term used by workers on evening or overnight shifts to describe a person of either sex who works only “normal business hours”; often characterized by a compulsive concern for wearing a necktie or avoiding jeans.

DESK RATS: that’s OK, you know who you are.

[…]

HAMMERED: describes text with a significant number or garbles, misprints, or omissions that render it unreadable or call into question its validity.

[…]

KORLING: acronym for “Korean linguist,” an occupational speciality. It would look less like a Scottish sport or Canadian beer if spelled with a hyphen.

[…]

U STREET U: nickname for the Agency training school overflow building located on U Street in the District of Columbia during the 1950s. In itself, this is a diminutive for the slightly disparaging nickname “U Street University.”

The whole document is available right here.

The Ring of Truthiness

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1

From a Freakonomics post at the New York Times:

If I were a clever, real economist, I might neatly package the conclusion along the lines of the demand for opiates being relatively inelastic, but the brand (?) sensitivity is low, and once the incidental costs of heroin (inconvenience, lower quality, abscesses, disease, visibility) became lower than the absolute cost of oxycontin, the market suddenly tilted. (That’s probably mostly gibberish, but it sounds economish.)

Economish! Great coinage there. ‘Supply-side economish.’ ‘The Austrian school of economish’.

Plus, it’s a great word to use, representing the evaporation of any credibility the whole discipline may have once had. Anyone see where the Dow is these days? Exactly, who cares!