Peter Bromhead: Buzzwords circling overhead

A potentially portentous emoji. Illustration / Peter Bromhead

Having learned recently that the long shadow of the bean counters has fallen across this column, I found myself idly wondering about the origins of this buzzword.

I expected to find all sorts of minutiae buried in Wikipedia, but other than a few slightly derogatory definitions, the term "bean counter" has attracted scant literary comment.

I thought an American dictionary came up with the most succinct definition: "A person, such as an accountant or financial officer, who is concerned with quantification, especially to the exclusion of other matters, such as creativity."

What did surprise me is the number of new buzzwords being recorded as part of everyday language. I was particularly taken by the term "kinetic typography", to describe animation techniques involving moving text, usually accompanied by corresponding speech.

I wish I'd known that buzzword in my teenage years, particularly when escorting young ladies to the movies.

In those days, at half-time we were subjected to boring musical interludes, when audiences were expected to accompany the cinema organ by singing lyrics flashed on the screen, aided by an idiotic bouncing ball. I'm sure my companions would have been most impressed if I'd wearily muttered, "Gawd! How un-cool is this kinetic typography?"

Another buzzword creeping into business jargon is "phantonym". This is defined as a word which looks as though it means a particular thing, but in fact means something completely different. The most common example being the use of the word "gay", originally meaning "happy" but since shanghaied to describe homosexuality.

The New York Times quotes a recent phantonym gaffe in a speech by President Obama, who innocently stated, "I want the American people to have fulsome accounting for my stimulus programme". Clearly, he meant "full", because the word "fulsome" means "excessively flattering" or "insincerely earnest" or even "slightly disgusting".

People who like to speed up their text messaging with a pictorial digital image, such as posting a thumbs up symbol rather than bothering to write a sentence, may be interested to learn the buzzword for such images is "emoji". They're related to those smiley faces made up of combinations of punctuation marks.

Emoji, however, are much more sophisticated, and whole alphabets of pictorial images are installed on the latest mobile phones.

Imagine, one day soon, the bean counters of this world will not have to write Dear John letters; instead, they'll just send a cheery pictorial image of an axe.