In the comments Susan got it totally right in calling me on a huge jargon violation! Thus, my direction for the New Year. The year of jargon-less communications or at least an attempt at it.
Jargon - closely associated with pidgin, a broken form of language. Also associated with a big fat "F" for a grade.
I know how I got there. It began with my profession, Information Technology, IT. We're full of acronyms and phrases. Does your program have a "bug?" It's not something with six legs, it's a problem, usually more accurately described as and ERROR. Did your program come to an abnormal termination - well you had an ABEND.
After that it was easy to slip into regional shorthand. A frequent commenter on the local newspaper site, Dognabit is my moniker, I picked up abbreviations as quickly as the rest of them. Ask me where I live -- well, I live in Montgomery County Maryland. Get me online and "Montgomery County" becomes "MoCo." It's not new, when I moved here my husband, who grew up here, and his friends always referred to it as "Monkey County." One of the counties next to ours, Price George's was P.G. . For a person of my generation that involved another shorthand - pregnant. Residents of the primate county felt themselves superior to those of the PG county. Since then Howard County, to the northeast of Montgomery, has had a building boom. It's shorthand is "HoCo." Being situation next to the District of Columbia and Baltimore, bastions of Black Southern dialect's, ho, a shorthand for whore is what comes to mind when Howard County appears in people's on-line comments. I guess I'd rather be a MoCo primate than a low-class PG teased-up hair gal, or a HoCo sell-out.
Back to our party. Upcounty is the Northern part of Montgomery County, which at 400 square miles is a diverse area. Downcounty is the area bordering the District of Columbia and was generally developed before 1970. Sometimes you'll hear Sunday morning talk shows talk about the the Washington Beltway. That's a road that rings the inner area, demarcating those with homes that are freezing in the winter/hot in the summer because they were built before 1970, and those who live in the newer more spacious regions, where your yard is big enough you can set off fireworks without someone calling the police in 10 seconds.
My New Year's resolution is to keep annoying my sister with half-truths about her boyfriend, and to make sure I do so with clear, non-jargon laden language.
