Buzzword contest from BuzzWhack

BuzzWhack has a buzzword contest going on:

We’ll be giving away 7 free copies of The Buzzword Dictionary each week through November 1, 2006 to the people who nominate the best 7 buzzwords each week.

A lot of the nominees on BuzzWhack’s front page aren’t buzzwords in the sense that the site defines them. They’re just new slang and jargon, not, in the site’s accurate definition “usually important-sounding word[s] or phrase[s] used primarily to impress laypersons.” Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary adds the sense that buzzwords are “often of little meaning.”

For example, the nominee keypal (E-mail pen pal) isn’t a buzzword. It’s not meant to impress. It’s not vague. I don’t think it’s even a common word outside of elementary school international-culture projects and high school foreign language classes (including English as a foreign language). It’s been around at least since the mid-1990s, but it’s not in the major English dictionaries yet. However, MSN Encarta Dictionary has it. The 2002 Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners of American English has it too.

Then again, looking through the BuzzWhack site, many of the accepted words aren’t buzzwords except in the general sense of “vogue words.” The first word is ABM (Anything [or Anyone] But Microsoft). That and many of the other words would find a better home on simple new-word sites like Wordspy and Double-tongued Word Wrestler Dictionary.

Buzzwords in the fullest negative sense are empty corporate-speak/management-speak phrases like “leveraging our skill sets to optimize output paradigms in a global environment.”