Have you ever wondered how many terms have crept into our business vocabulary? Some of them seem are so absurd that they belong more to the old days of barter trade than the modern digital world.

Those of us who work in the IT sector use terms like ‘resources’ to denote employees. It is akin to equating people to cattle. There are other forms like ‘billable resources’ (those on projects) and ‘benched resources’ (those without projects). Then there are the slews of mindless terms like ‘resource-mix’, ‘technical resource’ and so on.

Not to be left behind Financial analysts have created their own jargon. If the sensex comes down from 19,000 to 17,000 points then it a ‘correction’. Now I am slightly confused. If 17,000 is the correct level after the 'correction', then was 19,000 a wrong level? How come a price increase (Bull run) is correct but price reduction (bear movement) a correction? The ‘bull’ and ‘bear’ terms themselves are reminiscent of cattle fair.

But the Human Resources department takes the cake. They have introduced terms like ‘right-sizing’ which is basically lay-offs. But one wonders, why the right size is always smaller? This is like Kareena Kapoor’s size zero in the box-office dud ‘Tashan’.

Sometime I am reminded of my days as a medical student where we had terms that sounded like characters from Asterix comics. a example is 'Orbicularis Oris', a muscle surrounding the mouth region.But fortunately for me I fall on the ‘right- side’ of these new and improved terms as a doctor cum IT professional.