‘WSJ’ Teaches Kids New SlangThe Wall Street Journal reaches perhaps unprecedented levels of taxonomic analysis today with a page-one item about the emergence of “bucket” as a business term. Seems that, in the exec vernacular, “bucket” is now being used to describe company units, revenue sources, markets — in short, anything that can be grouped, categorized, or partitioned. It’s used as a verb (“to bucket” a guy is to assign him a place), as an adjective (“the investor is looking for something buckety,” as in big and solid), and pretty much as a substitute for any other word in the language. “Silo” is gone. “Block” is so nineties. It’s all about the bucket. Buckety bucket bucket!
The clincher, however, is one of those famed WSJ dot drawings that accompanies the text. For what we suspect is the first time in the newspaper’s history, it depicts — we’ll let the caption speak for itself.
Business Types Get a New Kick Out of the ‘Bucket’ [WSJ]
in other news
The Man in the Moon Is Feeling Gassy
Do you “outgas” sometimes at inopportune moments? Have you been known to emit a “sigh” after a bean-filled meal? According to an odd blurb in today’s “Science Times,” the moon does both. That ball of cheese in the sky releases gas from time to time, says the paper of record, which tries to apply poetic whimsy to its report on a recent study published in Nature. The lunar body “shows signs of a relatively recent release of gas from deep beneath the surface,” says the article, headlined “The Moon Sighs.” (Why not “The Moon Breaks Wind”?) While flatulence is perhaps better attributed to outpourings from Titan (a moon of Saturn wrapped mostly in methane), the real reason, we suppose, to avoid the more direct language is that no gas leak in cold space, whether said to imitate the mouth or the anus, has any odor or sound. So even if the Gray Lady’s anthropomorphism of the moon could be excused, one truth remains. In space, no one can hear you fart.
— Carl Rosen
Spiders, Peppers, and a Pathway to Pain [NYT]
