The Old New Thing

Microspeak: T-shirt sizing

May 12, 2009 May 12, 2009 05/12/09

Raymond Chen

Larry Osterman discussed the buzzword T-shirt sizing, which means "making extremely rough estimates in terms of a small number of predefined categories." The term comes from the traditional way T-shirt sizes are specified in the United States. Instead of having T-shirts in sizes 4, 5, 6 and so on, there are only a small number of sizes: Small...