What's hot, what's not

Erin McKean, founder of the Wordnik online dictionary, reviewed some of the new words and acronyms introduced during 2011 in the Wall Street Journal. Two of the most interesting “blended words” in business are “acquihire,” which describes the practice of acquiring a company mainly to get access to their human capital, and “solomo,” which combines social networking, local commerce and mobile communications.

She also described some popular new acronyms in 2011 and defined “acronyms” as a string of letters pronounced as words, like RADAR (for RAdio Detection And Ranging and now accepted as an actual word). These differ from “initialisms,” which are letters pronounced as themselves, like the IRS.

Two new acronyms this year that McKean noted in the article sound like familiar words: CARBS and CIVETS. CARBS (Canada, Australia, Russia, Brazil and South Africa) are the countries most affected by fluctuations in the price of commodities and CIVETS (Colombia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa is a clever acronym because it stands for the next generation of young tiger economies.

Are you in touch with language trends when you communicate with internal and external audiences? Is your “voice” up to date and authentic or is it antiquated and academic? Ask, assess then act.