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Do You Speak Geek? 5 Tech Terms That Endure, And 5 That Got Defragged
https://www.cnet.com/tech/vibe-coding-pdoom-tech-terms-guide/ [cnet.com]
Tech [cnet.com]
Real talk: I’m not that up to speed on today’s tech vocabulary. That realization clocked me over the head this week when the Scotland-based Collins dictionary came out with its list of new and notable words for 2026 [collinsdictionary.com]. The words include p(doom) [cnet.com], which refers to the probability of AI-caused doom; mogging, meaning to outshine or upstage someone; friendslop, a type of low-budget video game played among friends; and ghost jobs, jobs advertised with no real position or intent to hire someone.
Vibe-coding, which was Collins’ Word of the Year for 2025 [theguardian.com], refers to a conversational way to teach an AI model without typing in all that pesky code. Enshittification, which the American Dialect Society chose as its 2023 Word of the Year [americandialect.org], means the gradual, profit-driven decline in the quality of, well, I guess, everything.
Maybe you know and use these terms regularly; maybe you don’t. But, in an effort to stop myself from becoming that Steve Buscemi faking-it-in-high-school meme [knowyourmeme.com], I wanted to lay out some tech terms that have a permanent home in the popular lexicon and the words, phrases and abbreviations that haven’t quite stood the test of time. (Note to self: Stop saying “emoticon.”)
Selfie: You know what a selfie is; my mother, on the other hand, may not. The word for taking a photo of yourself with any camera-enabled device was first coined in 2002 on an Australian internet chat forum, of all places, but didn’t become mainstream until 2013.
Content creator: “Influencer [mashable.com]” also works here, to refer to a person who shares information on a tech platform and builds an audience of online followers. A related word, “parasocial,” refers to the one-sided relationship listeners or viewers may have with the creator or influencer, who, in contrast, doesn’t know they exist.
Podcast: The Oxford Dictionary named podcast the Word of the Year back in 2005 [oup.com]. Since then, the term, which is a mashup of iPod and broadcast and refers to a digital program made available on-demand for streaming or download, has remained relevant. The iPod, however? Not so much. It was discontinued in 2022 [cnet.com].
WFH (work from home): The trend of working from your own home via computer saw a substantial uptick during and after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. According to a 2022 survey by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 23% of Americans work remotely.
Unfriend: The New Oxford American Dictionary‘s 2009 Word of the Year [oup.com] became popularized thanks to Facebook, but the term that means ending a friendship has actually been around for quite some time. NPR called it “the Sleeping Beauty of words,” [nprillinois.org] as the term dates back to the 17th century, when it basically meant the same thing.
Metaverse: Remember when Mark Zuckerberg poured like $80 billion into a virtual reality project that was being touted as the internet platform of the future [cnet.com]? The metaverse and its flagship app, Horizon Worlds, were announced in 2021. Five years later, it all fell apart [cnet.com]. Now, Zuck is investing a ton in AI [cnet.com], which he’s touting as the internet technology of the future. Second verse, same as the first?
NFT: Just a couple of years ago, you couldn’t go online without reading about NFTs [cnet.com]. Nonfungible tokens are digital identifiers to certify ownership of, well, a digital thing of value. Heck, remember when President Donald Trump released an NFT [collecttrumpcards.com]? After the boom in popularity, and the subsequent crash in value of most of them, the term NFT has all but left the public consciousness.
World Wide Web: It’s the internet, folks. Or, the information superhighway if you’re nasty.
Defrag: Back in my day, when we needed better performance from our Windows-based computers, we’d defragment the hard drive. There were plenty of tools you could use to do so. Apparently, this is no longer a thing people do, which is fun, since I still like to use the term in everyday situations. While we’re at it, I’ll be right back. I need to go defrag the car.
Emoticon: Technically, emoticons are made from standard keyboard characters read sideways, such as 🙂 to generate a smiley face. Emoji [cnet.com] are graphical images that you can select in various communication programs. (Sometimes, if you try to type an old-school emoticon, the program you’re working in will just grab it and turn it into an emoji.) These days, we just say emoji, even if the word sounds more like a dessert.
