My sister and I made up lots of words when we were kids. (This is before my brother was born - when we stopped making up words and just taught Evan to repeat the silly things we said.)
The words made no sense whatsoever and I have no idea what in the world we were doing that made us come up with them. But I'll never forget "chungum", "mezzali", "flowerdymane" and others - nor will I forget what the words mean!
Silly words and acronymns are fun and they're great tools to drive process for teams. For example, we use the following at Argyle:
- Demopportunity - the combination of demo and opportunity reminds the sales guys that all demos should get converted as Opportunities in Salesforce. And that they should think carefully about the prospects that they demo.
- BLUW - this is an acronymn for Budget, Looking, Understands, Willing - which is Argyle's version of BANT. We refer to leads as "bluw" - pronounced like the color blue - with regularity. I ask "Is it bluw?" several times a day.
- TWBAGMI - this is an acronymn for "This will be a great meeting if...". It is pronounced as "T.W. Bag Me". We don't use it internally, but I think about it when I run meetings to make sure that I'm working towards a goal - either mine or my colleague's. My friend Matt mentioned the acronymn to me in passing in 2005 and it stuck.
Any homemade words or acronymns you'd like to share?