Slingin' Slang

I was reading the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal this morning -yes, I read this paper every morning because I'm still charading as an executive on hiatus - and there was a book review on a little business book called, BizzWords, by Gregory Bergman. (To give credit where credit is due, the review was written by Charles Harrington Elster.) The book is a dictionary of sorts of corporate slang. You've all heard the terms like "low hanging fruit", "cutting edge", or the one I loathe most, "push back". Apparently there's a whole new crop of terms for the working gal to know. Here are a few of my favorites:

prairie-dogging - the sudden appearance of a person's head over the top of a cubicle wall when something interesting or noisy happens
ohnosecond - the little bit of time it takes you to realize you've made a huge mistake
chainsaw consultant - a consultant brought in to fire people
And the best yet:
mucus trooper - employee with a cold/flu that refuses to stay home from work

So I started thinking about Slang. Different industries clearly have their own slang. Obviously business does. There's Street Slang. There's probably Academic Slang (is that an oxymoron?). I'm guessing there might be some Political/Media Slang.

But what about Mommy Slang? We have situations that require "special words". One we use in my house is "Whineyville" - a term used to describe cranky kids, e.g. "Action is on his way to Whineyville."

I think our first official term in the Mommy Slang dictionary should be stolen from the BizzWord guy (I think it makes it legit somehow - see? I used Street Slang already - legit). It is mucus trooper - the kid who comes to school/daycare with a communicable disease because his parents don't have enough vacation days to keep him at home. (You all know who I'm talking about - we've all done it!)

So let's think up some more.......

Here's one for getting out of commitments using email, "ebail".

What about the term for the mom you always call for a playdate when you need a free babysitter? "Houseketeer"

Here's another one from my house, "food fit" - the fit a kid throws around dinner or snack time because he is hungry.

"Carpool" is so 80's - I run a "kidcab", totally 2000, right?!

So here are some more situations that we need some slang terms for - maybe you can help out on these:

• The mom who volunteers WAY too much (maybe a special name for the volunteer who's kid doesn't even go to that school anymore)
• When you have more than one game/practice/rehearsal on the same day
• A name for all those fundraisers that come home from school

Share any terms you already use. Let's build our own vocabulary so we can Slang it around when our husband's get home. After all, we need to push back a little ourselves (argh! Yes, I had to use it!).