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Notable incorporated words


  • succession planning (Corp n.): Lining up replacements for senior managers in case of medical or PR disaster. (Think: Cardinal Wolsey in a pantsuit.)

  • to write (Corp v.): to underwrite; to take on the risks of.

  • retrocessionary (n.): Reinsurer of a reinsurer, who is "ceded" part of the first reinsurer's written reinsurance.

  • to productionalise (Corp v.): to produce (test, polish and deploy).

  • halfly (Corp adj.): twice a year (compare quarterly). Delightful!

  • to downselect (Corp v.): to choose (!)

  • backpocket (n.): Crib notes for the CEO so they don't look totally stupid in interviews. Refers both to the briefing and the people who produce it "My backpocket tell me...".
  • to clopen (worker v.): to shut the shop for the night, then go home to sleep inadequately, then come back and open the shop in the morning.

  • acting up (Corp n.): performing work above one's position

  • to socialise (Corp v.): to spread around; to make accepted.

  • information scrap (Corp v.): process of realising that your data is too crap to use and not worth cleaning. Evacuating the mine, finding the killswitch.

  • information rework (Corp v.): process of spending a whole day cleansing a 4GB CSV, that it might be better than nothing for tomorrow.

  • to project (data v.): to select fields from a relation. Emphasis on ject. e.g.:
    projected = FOREACH relation GENERATE col4 .. col9.
    projects columns 4 through 9 inclusive, and leaves out ("projects out") the others.

  • newsjacking (Corp n.): posting ads on social media in response to current affairs. Classy lampshade.

  • purchase funnel (Corp n.): your journey from ignorance to being broke and surrounded by things.

  • business rule (Corp n.): Decision algorithm; always outputs a boolean?

  • to reach out to (v.): talk to.

  • to cascade (v.): talk to and make them talk to.

  • NewSQL (n.): The normals have caught up to "NoSQL" so we need a new thing.

  • ETL and LTS (compound v.): Extract-Transform-Load and Load-Transform-Store; covering the pre-processing and processing bits of a data pipeline.

  • exputation (n.): replacing hopelessly bad data with NULL or ?, flagging one's total uncertainty without biasing the sample (as in listwise deletion, the usual method). Item abnegation. My coinage. (Multiple imputation is a much subtler and less destructive method, I know.)

  • brain-compiled (adj.): code written without ever being run.

  • numerate (n.): Solecism for quantitative, trained in STEM, our best truth detection methods. 'Numerate' is an outsider's degrading way of putting it, as if patience with numbers were all it took to keep the modern information economy in the air.

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