Worst Corporate¹ Name Changes

1. Bearing Point (or BreakingPoint?) KPMG’s attempt to distance itself from the rest of the former ‘Big Six’ accounting² firms.

2. Enron Still doing business as Enron!? The crisis management rulebook calls for a clean break with the past to re-position the company. But then Enron never was one to follow the rules.

Top Corporate Words or Phrasees

1. The Schultz Defense³ "I know nothing . . . nothing!" From the running line of the pudgy German guard in the now defunct⁴ TV series "Hogan's Heroes."

2. Dot communism The belief that all on-line services should be free.

3. Dematerialization (of documents) Correspondence does not need to be shredded⁵, if it is published by the Web and internet.

4. Low-hanging Fruit Easy-to-win accounts.

5. Rank-and-Yank The technique of ranking employees annually⁶ and then cutting the lowest 10% loose.

Top Advertising⁷ Word

1. Frothy A fresh or original idea. Supplants⁸ ‘edgy’ which was THE word for a few years now.

Top Internet Words Moving into Widespread Use

1. Interface⁹ To converse¹⁰ as in, “Let’s interface”.

2. Multi-task To perform several tasks at the same time.

3. Reboot To start over or begin a new effort.

4. Out of Bandwidth (or RAM) Unable to multi-task..

5. Crash As in ‘My hard drive crashed’.

Top Color-related Words

1. Cornflower Shade of blue

2. Periwinkle Grey/blue

3. Cerulean Blue

4. Plum Purple

5. Cerise Pink

Top Sports-related Words

1. BCS College football’s Bowl Championship Series to crown a national championship in lieu of a playoff.

2. Grand Slam Tiger Woods did not win all four of golf’s major tourneys in the same year, though he did own all four trophies¹¹ at the same time; dubbed¹² the ‘Tiger Slam’.

Top Five Most Misspelled Words

1. Grateful You should be grateful to know that keeping "great" out of "grateful" is great.

2. Judgement This word is governed by one of the rare rules of English orthography¹³, so why not enjoy it? After [c] and [g], [e] is retained to indicate the letter is "soft," i.e. pronounced like [s] or [j], respectively.

3. Its/it's The apostrophe marks a contraction¹⁴ of "it is." Something that belongs to it is "its."

4. Founder¹⁵ Flounder is a fish; ‘to founder’ is to run aground.

5. Misspell What is more embarrassing than to misspell the name of the problem?

Most frequently spoken word on the Planet:

1. O.K. Still the most popular word in languages around the world.

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