New words are what make English wonderful. And spot the obMSCL.

	an umfriend is a sexual partner of dubious standing	Have you suffered an attack of beepilepsy recently? Or been uninstalled from a G.O.O.D. job? Or found a new umfriend? If these questions leave you mystified, the odds are that you're not a mouse potato. As computers and technology impinge more and more on our lives, and as employment patterns and sexual mores change, a new lexicon of slang is emerging. Beepilepsy is the spasm people go into when their pager or mobile phone goes off: uninstalled means sacked, while a G.O.O.D. job is a menial one taken purely to "get out of debt". And an umfriend is a sexual partner of dubious standing: "This is um Philip, my um friend." Mouse potatoes are the Nineties equivalent of couch potatoes. These are the people who go ego-surfing (looking up references to their own name on the Internet), can often double geek (work on two computers at the same time), and have to contend with keyboard plaque (the dirt and fluff that accumulates between computer keys). They keep their underware (personal files on an office network) hidden from the boss, while indulging in the occasional bout of percussive maintenance (hitting a computer to get it to work again). For those of us still in caveman mode (unskilled at coping with the new technology), the ohnosecond is that minuscule fraction of time in which you realise you have just deleted the whole afternoon's work by mistake. Perhaps those at the cutting edge of the computer revolution have coined these terms to preserve their sanity and sense of humour, a defence mechanism against the fear that computers could take over their lives. If so, slang is providing similarly needed humour in the cut-throat employment market of the Nineties. We now have chainsaw consultants (outside experts brought in to sack workers, leaving the real bosses with clean hands and consciences). There are blobocracies (time-serving middle managers who contribute little to a firm's output), who stand out by their nerd-packs (the rows of pens in their top pockets), and whose main hobby is blamestorming (discussing in groups why a mistake occurred and whose fault it was).
	the ohnosecond is that minuscule fraction of time in which you realise you have just deleted the whole afternoon's work by mistake.	Freelancers who work part-time for several employers now indulge in daylighting (as opposed to moonlighting). In this cynical, insecure environment, the best way for a heatseeker (ambitious employee) to achieve promotion is by assmosis (kissing up to the boss, rather than working hard). In PR and the media, the way to get on is by warming the bed (mobilising your personal contacts to ensure success). Some of these networks of contacts are hominterns (those exclusively for gay people - who, incidentally, now call straight people breeders.) For the plebs who are left behind - the sheeple (sheep-people) - there are only minimal compensations, such as the Xerox subsidy (personal photocopying done at work). When it all gets too much, downtrodden employees are in danger of going postal (finally becoming too stressed out to cope) - in America, several postal workers have gone on shooting rampages. Among the most prolific inventors of new terms are financial dealers, many of whom are former barrowboys and market traders who have brought slang to the City. Most offices there are cube farms (huge floors divided up by screens), which have given rise to prairie dogging (everyone popping their heads up over the walls to discover the cause of a sudden noise). Unsolicited e-mails are known as spam, angry replies to them as flame-mails. But even those of us at relatively low levels of technological activity now have slang terms we can employ. Got a satellite dish? Call it your chimney wok. Sick of all the virtually worthless petrol tokens you have collected? Then refer to them as fairy money. But don't bore people by using too many of these terms together. Their brain might switch off and you'll be treated to their screen-saver face.