I ran across some notes I took on a team meeting hosted by a senior executive in what I’m guessing was the late 2010s. As I noted some time ago, I keep an eye out for new jargon terms so I can add them to my Microspeak citations. This is particularly true of meetings with senior executives, because they are often the source of new jargon terms, which then get picked up by lower-level employees, because as my colleague Michael Grier noted, “The intended purpose for this jargon is not to communicate with the people who work for you, but to impress the people you work for.” If a senior executive likes golf and uses a lot of golfing metaphors, you’re going to start using golfing metaphors because your boss likes them.

My notes for this particular meeting included three new terms, none of which appears to have stuck around, but I record them here for posterity (or in case they make a comeback).

Taking on new work puts existing tasks at risk. We need to create airspace to accommodate it.

Here, airspace is not referring to negotiating screen real estate between disparate UI frameworks but rather appears to be simply a synonym for “create room” or “provide capacity by deprioritizing other work.”

Here’s another term that showed up later in the meeting:

A key element in improving our ability to move quickly is investment in high value synthetics.

I assumed that the senior executive was not talking about synthetic fabrics like polyester and rayon, so I raised my hand. “What do you mean by high value synthetics?”

The vice president explained (perhaps with an exasperated sigh) that “high value synthetics” refers to automated testing, as opposed to manual testing.¹

The third piece of proto-Microspeak that showed up in my notes was the abbreviation AOI, which apparently stands for area of investigation, and which means basically “something that could be done.” I don’t have a sentence citation for this one, just notes that the term arose, what the letters stood for, and an attempt at providing a definition.

Other Microspeak terms that arose in the meeting which I have discussed previously are light up and all-up.

Bonus chatter: Just so you don’t think this meeting was just a fountain of proto-Microspeak, I also have this sentence in my notes:

We didn’t want to build another management dashboard because that just gives managers another way to yell at people.

¹ Does that mean that manual testing is organic?