This morning, a colleague referred me to the following sentence:
"We’ve earned accolades from our clients as well as industry recognition for creative solutions and marketing strategies that exceed our clients’ expectations."
He argues that exceed isn't the best word here. "Whenever someone uses exceed to mean 'go beyond in a good way,' I urge him to change it to surpass. Exceed often has a pejorative connotation: 'He was cited for exceeding the speed limit,' or 'You've exceeded your month's bandwidth.' But surpass is always positive."
This sounds right, connotatively if not necessarily denotatively.
When You Use "Exceed" in a Positive Way, Say "Surpass"
skinback
skinback [journalistic slang for peeling back your skin and feeling the pain]: retraction of the premise of an article
In his Reuters column yesterday, "How I Misread News Corp.'s Taxes," David Cay Johnston wrote, "For the first time in my 45-year-old career I am writing a skinback ... I will do all I can to make sure everyone who has read or heard secondary reports based on my column also learns the facts and would appreciate the help of readers in that cause."
See also: In 2008, Jack Shakfer explained another journalistic term, "reverse ferret."
skunkworks
What does it take to scare Google? In 2009, Microsoft's launch of Bing lit a fuse under the search giant. In his recent book, In the Plex, Steven Levy explains:
The search team set up a war room, hurriedly launching an effort dubbed the skunkworks. (That appellation, first used at Lockheed aircraft during World War II, is a generic term for an off-the-books engineering effort that operates outside a company's stifling bureaucracy.)
Refining the definition, I'd say "skunkworks" is a secret effort that seeks to maximize innovation by operating outside a company's stifling bureaucracy.
Yet when trying to use the word in a sentence, I wasn't sure whether it was a noun or adjective. Is it a "skunkworks project," or just a "skunkworks"? Merriam-Webster's dictionary, which lists "Skunk Works" as a "service mark," didn't provide guidance, so I e-mailed its language research service. Trademark Editor, Daniel Brandon, replied as follows:
The full entry for “Skunk Works” on our Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary is:
Skunk Works service mark — used for research and development services
The important thing to note here is the function label, “service mark.” This means that this term is not strictly speaking a noun, adjective, or any other part of speech. It is instead a registered service mark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. These are much like trademarks (which we treat in the dictionary in the same way), only it has slightly different uses and conditions.
As such, we are obliged to enter it only as the mark specifies. This is why we do not show “skunkworks,” as a lower-case closed compound.
So, I'd say that "skunkworks" may be used as an adjective or noun:
I do my best work in a skunkworks environment; skunkworks are my favorite projects.
pre-friending
pre-friending: friending someone online who you want to meet offline
Have you ever pre-friended someone?
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