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Free Rice…what could it mean? 

Maybe rice needs freeing. (Like Tibet?) Or maybe somebody named Rice needs freeing. (Condoleeza, perhaps?) Or maybe somebody is giving rice away, and wants you to have some. Mmmm…rice. I’m on my lunch break and haven’t eaten yet; I’m hungry, and even the paper on my desk is looking tasty. 

Unfortunately, this Free Rice has nothing to do with my lunch. FreeRice.com does give away free rice, but they donate it to the UN Food Program to help end world hunger.

Sitting here in my office with leftover pizza in my lunchbox, I probably don’t qualify for the giveaway. In fact, the only reason I’m suffering from hunger (whether personal or global) right now is that I visited freerice.com. (Found it on BlogFish, one of our excellent Word Counters Union blogs.)

The central feature of the Free Rice website is a vocabulary quiz, and for every answer you get right, they donate 20 grains of rice. Might not seem like a lot, but it adds up — just today, in the last few minutes, I donated 1620 grains of rice with my vocabulary. Which still isn’t a lot, but it adds up; in the last year and a half or so, all the Free Ricers combined have donated more than 39.6 billion grains. I’m guessing that would make a few good pans of Rice Krispy treats. (Now if only the website also donated marshmallows, we’d really have something.)

Rice is nice and all, but what actually kept me going on the quiz – and I would have gone longer, but I had to microwave my pizza — is their Vocab Level score. I had to see how high I could go, and once I hit my peak, I had to prove I could hold on at that level as a matter of pride. (It was 50, by the way.)

If you want to get a word nerd to support global hunger relief, I guess a competitive vocabulary quiz is a good way to go.

So follow my philanthropic example and go to freerice.com — and if you’re interested in sharing (or bragging, which is what I’m doing), leave a comment about what vocabulary level you get. Just don’t outdo mine; one-upping Ing on Blog Ing is not allowed.

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Slap Your Coworker Day is coming! Read all about it here. Sounds like a really good time will be had by all.

And from the same website, I bring you this — the website calls it a thesaurus, but it’s not. Really it’s a lexicon. A glossary of specialized office terminology. I found it very useful, and I hope you will too. (For instance, today at work I’m spending way too much time on some administrivia that everyone has to do because a testiculation meeting was canceled, and right now everyone is prairie-dogging to see why the entire corridor smells like diesel exhaust; and I also get the feeling that this is going to be another Salmon Day.)

So to help you describe your workday more succinctly and accurately, here’s the list:

TESTICULATING - Waving your arms around and talking bollocks.

BLAMESTORMING - Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

SEAGULL MANAGER - A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

ASSMOSIS - The process by which people seem to absorb success and advancement by sucking up to the boss rather than working hard.

SALMON DAY - The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die.

CUBE FARM - An office filled with cubicles.

PRAIRIE DOGGING - Cubicle-dwellers popping their heads up over the walls to see what’s going on (e.g. when some loud noise is made, or when the scent of pastries wafts across the cube farm).

MOUSE POTATO - The on-line, wired generation’s answer to the couch potato.

SITCOMs - Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids or start a “home business.”

STRESS PUPPY - A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiny.

XEROX SUBSIDY - Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one’s workplace.

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE - The fine art of banging on an electronic device to get it to work again.

ADMINISPHERE - The rarefied organisational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the “adminisphere” are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the ground-level problems they were designed to solve. See also ADMINISTRIVIA.

ADMINISTRIVIA - Needless paperwork and burdensome processes that often are dropped from the adminisphere. 

404 - Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web error message “404 Not Found,” meaning that the requested document could not be located.

OHNOSECOND - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realise that you’ve just made a BIG mistake (e.g. you’ve hit ‘reply all’).

WOOFies - Well Off Older Folk.

CROP DUSTING - Surreptitiously farting while passing through a CUBE FARM, then enjoying the sounds of dismay and disgust; leads to PRAIRIE DOGGING.

There it is. Hope it proves useful.

If this lexicon can help you better describe your day, please let me know — examples are welcome. If you have any additions to the vocabulary, you’re welcome to leave them in a comment, too.

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