Last weekend, the blog Schott’s Vocab ran a competition to reveal workplace lingo.

Many professions have their own languages, with terminology that only the initiated can understand. The most obvious must be in medicine, where it can seem that doctors are speaking a foreign language with lots of long, strange word combinations.

Even if your job doesn’t have an entirely different vocabulary, you’re likely to use some work-specific language during your day that an outsider wouldn’t understand. It may be specific to your industry, company or even your particular workplace. Coming up with your own shorthand can be a good way of bonding with colleagues.

So, what interesting terms did the Schott’s readers come up with?

running heads: describes the content in the margins, but always makes me think of heads running. (Publishing)

tombstone: [...], we refer to that basic block of object information as the “tombstone”. You know, the Artist’s name, life dates, title of work, year of creation, materials, credit line. (Museums)

calendar: to schedule time on someone’s online corporate calendar program (”If you want to sit down and discuss the Pensky file, calendar me”). (Corporate/office)

Code18: for a computer user whose perceived problem isn’t due to a malfunction in the computer but with something in (or not in, more like) his/her own head, 18″ from the monitor. (IT)

I can’t imagine what non-native English speakers make of these! I’m sure other languages have their own workplace lingos also, anyone got any examples?