Just when we think we’ve got the English Language all figured out, along comes some perpetuating

Know-all to muddle it all up, causing us to furiously turn the pages of our dusty dictionaries to find out the meaning of a new word. And it’s always some concoction of something they want to say but there’s no word for it yet, or same technological advancement of which someone has yet to peg a term to.

Click and mortar, for example, appears to be the result of the copulation of two industries that have seen the relevance of such a union, especially in today’s high tech age where we can buy and sell just about anything on the Web, including property.

In the last 10 years or so, there have been numerous words appearing seemingly out of nowhere. And depending on our jobs, new terms or words can be excruciating or they can just be stored in the recesses of our memories and used when the need arises to demonstrate being ‘in the know’ when in the company of friends or, better still, strangers. The list seems endless.

Infortainment. Go for this and that, bring the kids and be ‘infortained’. It takes me a couple of seconds before I realise that it means to have fun the ‘education way’ (if there is such a thing). The kids might beg to differ, though, specially with the aggressive attitude of parents these days who, according to my son, "take the fun out of everything, even fun". That’s easy enough.

But what about jargon such as B2B or B2C? Five years ago, when these terms appeared (independently without explanatory brackets), a lot of people scratched their heads and frowned. Turning to the bespectacled masters of the language – invariably those with suitable credentials (with honours mind you!) – they searched for an answer. Well, admittedly, not everyone could be certain. Some guessed, others "looked up at the same moon and wondered" (remember Neil Diamond’s Done Too Soon?), while the rest didn’t bother. But like most things, by the time realisation dawns even upon the ignorant, most of the then unfamiliar jargon has found common usage. But it doesn’t end there.

Each day, so many new ones crop out from under the woodwork that it is sometimes almost impossible to keep up with the deluge. And you never know it’s there until it this you, or when the boss sends you an e-mail using a new term he learned today at a business lunch. Jargon is almost like a weed – it just seems to grow uncontrollably.

Recently, when socialising with a few old friends, one’s a lawyer, another a marketing manager and the last one, a lecturer, a strange term leaped up in between the laughter, cigarette smoke and peanuts. Apart from talking about the pranks we played in school and how great the bottles of wine we ware sharing ware, the topics of our conversation drifted to office computer systems.

We were past our third bottle of red when my merketing manager friend talked about the necessity of ‘fire walls’ in each company given that these days, the terminals on most offices are linked. The table fell silent. The lawyer among us was probably searching in the deep recesses of his mind for some court document where, or if, he had come across that word. The lecturer that word. The lecturer was the only one who went, "What’s a ‘fire wall’? Connected with the fire walking ceremony of Thaipusum?"

After a jibe here and a poke there, and another bottle of red, we ended the evening with yet another word added to our vocabulary: one that means a computer security program that, despite the network that most office have, isolates or keeps secure certain information such as salaries. So there.But let’s face it. There are so many bits of jargon these days that it can be almost impossible to keep track os or list them out in a book. And if some genius did manage to succeed compiling them, with explanations at that, his book will become obsolete in a matter of months because new ones will flood the market before he can even get his draft to the printers.

Terms like ‘spam’. As a child, I knew it to be luncheon meat. ‘Gigaflop’, sure sounds like some thing you wouldn’t want to call a friend. ‘Cookie’, now that’s got certain connotations attached to ti. Yet obviously, these do have meanings.

Spam, for those who do not yet know, is a method of electronic advertising that is generally considered unethical because the message goes out to nearly everyone, even those who did not request the information. Remember how annoying it is to have your e-mail alert you to the fact that you’ve got mail, only to find, upon opening it, that it is about some bar’s happy hours? Especially irritating when you have had to put on hold the work you were doing just to read the message that you thought was important.

Gigaflop is a super-duper computer that can perform one billion operations per second. Wow! Can you imagine the new terms that are probably going to come out of that one, not to mention the price of it. Bill Gates wannabes are going to have a field day for sure!

And cookie, no. its not what you eat or the sweet better half who greets you with a martini when you get home after a hard day’s work. Rather, it’s the information sent by Internet to the server of the Webpage you are viewing. It details your preferences and customises the Webpage for you.

However, it is not in business alone that new words crop up every so often. The events in the global arena have also thrown up more than its fair share, The break-up of the former Yugoslavia has reminded the world of the existence the unwelcome term, ‘ethnic cleansing’. And who can remember what the Negroes in the US want to be called this year? First it was ‘Negroes’ )hence the unfortunate term ‘Nigger’), then it was ‘Blacks’, and now it’s ‘African Americans’. We’ll leave it to Jesse Jackson and the Democrats to figure that one out.

Before Lady Diana’s untimely death, how many of us actually heard of the ‘paparazzi’? And while a chant at the Woodstock festival in 1969 was ‘Power to the People’, The bloodless overthrow of the Filipino dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, gave the world ‘People to make the necessary reforms. And everyone remembers the "boat people' of Asia – those brave and desperate enough to face the treacherous seas and pirates to escape what it today recognised as the ‘pariah ideology – communism.

The world has changed and is changing. It only seems natural that with changes, new jargon must be thrown up. So, despite what Nostradamus predicted – that we’d all nuke ourselves to oblivion by 2000-we still have a fair bit of ways to go if former Soviet states can be persuaded from firing their nuclear missiles, and if attempts as nuclear proliferation by rogue nations can be thwarted. It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of words will go into the dictionary from here. During Ronald Reagan’s term in the White House, Iran referred to the US as the ‘Great Satan’. And who can forget Saddam Hussein being whipped by his ‘mother of all battles’. It can go on and on, but closer to home, let’s face it, we can no longer say that we are ‘gay’ to mean happy. That would invite stares or wore, indecent proposals. Neither would a girl say "I was pricked" despite the fact that she was indeed pricked by a needle.

Lest we all go insane with all this, or look knowledgeable yet not know what on earth a bit of jargon means, fear not. Dictionaries incorporating new words and terms have been produced and being updated on a regular basis. The only problem is keeping track of the jargon.