Sunday, January 01, 2012

Words on parade

However noble the military calling, plenty of evidence exists that boredom and incompetence are as rife as ever. I believe that the word Snafu (Situation normal, all fucked up) was an invention of soldiers. Another exhibit, this list of current Air Force slang expressions. Even though these people are not as smart as John Kerry, the vocabulary is both apt and imaginative. Many are applicable to civilian life for sure:

BLAMESTORMING - Sitting around  discussing  why a mission failed and who was responsible.

SEAGULL COLONEL - A colonel who swoops in, makes a lot of noise, and dumps stuff all over everything.

SALMON DAY - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

ASSMOSIS - The process by which some people seem to absorb success and promotability by kissing up to the commander.

ADMINISPHERE - The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the wing level. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are generally profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

404 - Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking the boss . . . he's 404, man."

GENERICA - Features of the Air Force landscape that are exactly the same no matter which base one is at, such as Burger King, Robin Hood, the BX, and AMC terminal. Used as in "We were so lost in generica that I forgot what base we were at."

OHNOSECOND - That minuscule fraction of time after hitting the "enter" key or clicking "ok" in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.



No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...