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Don't you just hate Orchids and Onions? By "Orchids and Onions," I refer to the most common title used on that genre of newspaper or magazine columns in which the writer doles out paragraphs of praise and censure. There are many variations on the title, all more or less nauseating. Like "Kudos and Klunkers," which really makes my skin crawl, because the botched parallelism convinces me that the writer thinks "kudos" is plural. (It isn't.)

But even this cliché genre can be effective if it's sufficiently ruthless. What typically makes the Orchid/Onioning smell so foul are weak items, usually trivial praise and generic censure; for example, "Orchids to Vernon and Gladys Snuff of Lurping Gulch on their 40th wedding anniversary/Onions to people who are rude."

But it's the lack of balance that irks me. Sure, it's safer to praise than to blame, at least in print, and with all the Orchid/Onion columns in so many newspapers and magazines trying not to offend anyone, there is a surplus of cloying Orchids and a shortage of stinky Onions.

Somebody has to drape a restorative thumb on the scale. Here, in an attempt to bring fairness and balance to the Orchid/Onion field and with no attempt at all to avoid offense, is a bouquet of ripe Onions for technical terms that should be subject to term limits.

Onions to "Web 2.0." Uhh, does Tim Berners-Lee get a say in when the Web gets revved? Or is it the rule that anybody named Tim gets to start his own Web? Internet2, IPv6, those terms actually refer to something. But Web 2.0: What's that exactly? Nobody seems to know. Last September Tim O'Reilly, who, along with his coconspirators at O'Reilly & Associates, coined the term, tried to explain what Web 2.0 was and/or wasn't. That essay convincingly demonstrated that Tim doesn't know either. If Tim (either of them) can't define it, I certainly shouldn't try, but I will anyway: Web 2.0 is a commemorative coin minted in celebration of the end of the dot-com crash. Like all commemorative coins, it has no actual value.

Onions to "podcast." Or specifically to the New Oxford American Dictionary for making "podcast" its Word of the Year. (They only do one?) Whatever you think of podcasting as a phenomenon, it's clear that the term "podcasting" is an unfortunate one, because it misleadingly gives Apple Computer credit for more than it deserves. And that's a task that we can confidently leave in the more than capable hands of Steven P. Jobs.

Onions to "best practices." Best? Says who?

Onions to "illegal immigrant." Let's replace the term "illegal immigrant" with "illegal employer." Apart from any question of fairness, the term "illegal immigrant" focuses on the aspect of the situation that is least subject to control. If we were to target, prosecute, and imprison illegal employers, I'm betting that illegal immigration would drop like the Ts in The Colbert Report. Okay, "illegal immigrant" is not a technology term, but I am applying a principle familiar to any software developer: Optimize the inner loops and don't worry about the code that runs just once. (Is this a Best Practice?)

Onions to "intellectual property." I'll admit that "intellectual property" is a useful term if you believe in the thing it describes. But I still propose banning it from our technical lexicon, because its use is inherently question-begging. If you use the term, you have already tacitly admitted that a property right exists in the matter under discussion. Better to focus on the claim in a neutral and unbiased way, like "Sony's nefarious attempt to subvert my inalienable right to manage my own media."

Onions to "foo is the new bar." Or anything is the new anything else. "Wikipedia is the new Google," one blogger proclaimed. No it isn't. The first dozen or so variations on the fashion industry pronouncement that "pink is the new black" were clever, but the thousands of imitations that followed are not. And nothing is the new anything else anyway. But especially, Wikipedia is not the new Google. Nor the new New Oxford American Dictionary. It's just being itself, and it's doing a heck of a job of it. I'm thinking of adopting Wikipedia's traffic-generating strategy for this column: "Read 'Swaine's Flames' every month to make sure that I haven't accused you of assassinating President Kennedy."

And you never accepted that pink was the new black anyway, did you?

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