Funny it should be the advanced math majors who get it: that words really o matter.
I am about to start doing some stringer work for a financial news agency — I won’t say which, since the contract is not signed yet — and I find that there is a term in the very thorough instruction manual they send me that I am not familiar with.
I find it in this excellent Cisco Systems investor relations glossary.
Earnout
A contractual provision stating that the seller of a business is to obtain additional future compensation based on the business achieving certain future financial goals.
It is more and more common for public companies to include investor education features on their IR Web sites — the chairman of the SEC believes firmly that if you want to get an even break, you have take personal responsibility for the fact that you are a sucker — but I have never seen a glossary so detailed that it includes terms of art like the following:
- Eat Your Own Dog Food
- An expression describing the act of a company using its own products for day-to-day operations.
Exercise: Translate the term into Brazilian Portuguese.
Interestingly, it seems to have been big tech multinationals who have taken the emerging discipline of terminology management most seriously.
IBM, for example.
SUNW.
I recently tried, and failed, to avise an investor relations client to get ahead of the curve and adopt the ISO standards on terminology management.
No matter how many sermons I preached on the virtues of not reinventing the wheel, they seemed to regard the whole idea as a Communist plot of some sort.
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