"password fatigue" and "pod slurping"

WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 574 Saturday 9 February 2008

MACQUARIE DICTIONARY WORDS OF 2007

Forget the Oscars, it's time to open the envelopes in this final round of voting for the best words of 2007.

The Macquarie Dictionary asked visitors to its Web site to vote on their favourite words of the year in no less than seventeen categories (now you can see why I thought of the Oscars). If you're interested in the details, you will find them on the Dictionary's site (http://wwwords.org?MCQD).

The term receiving the most votes out of the 75 on offer and which therefore wins the People's Choice Award is "password fatigue", frustration caused by having too many different passwords to remember, which results in an inability to remember even those most commonly used.

The choice of the Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year Committee was "pod slurping", which is defined as "the downloading of large quantities of data to an MP3 player or memory stick from a computer".

The press release said, "The committee felt that the most important criterion for word of the year should be linguistic creativity and evocativeness, rather than simple worthiness or usefulness."

The earliest example of "pod slurping" I have in my database was in the New Scientist on 25 June 2005 in an article that was widely picked up by other media. The article quotes the US American security expert Abe Usher, who seems to have invented it. The Macquarie definition doesn't give the full context - the term refers specifically to using MP3 players such as iPods and other USB storage devices to steal sensitive corporate data. There is also the closely related but rarer "data slurping".