If you ever watch movies like Heathers or Brick, you are familiar with the art of creating an original language out of plain old English. Mix a few words around, substitute a noun for a verb here and there, and presto, hip new dialect.

I’ve noticed that this phenomenon is not limited to the brilliant (or not so brilliant) minds of script writers. Just listen and you will probably find morphed language all around you. Industries and groups of all kinds seem to create words to describe things that apparently lack proper representation. And the office is no different. More intriguing even, is that the cubicle environment specifically, appears to have developed a style of communication all its own.

Cubunga aside, we have started using made-up words regularly in my office. We refer to our cubicles as cubies. People can often be heard yelling, ‘hey can you come over to my cubie for a minute?’ A recent addition by yours truly is the term resty. It’s a more discreet word for rest room, ‘let me call you back; I need to go to the resty’. We tend to refer to management as the parent of the person with whom we are speaking. Kind of like you do with your dog or kid when they have been naughty, ‘look what your dog did!’ So we say, ‘your mom was over here trying to see if I was doing any work’ or ‘your dad is making us go to that meeting’

We are in the process of developing a cubedia to document the growth of our new language. It reminds me of this episode of The Twilight Zone. Not the old ones, which were the best, but the ones they tried to remake in the eighties. There was one about this man who woke up one day and people were using the wrong words for things. Like they called chairs dinosaurs for example. And everyone could understand each other but he was like ‘what the heck is going on?’ So by the end of the episode, the language everyone was speaking, although still using English words, had become unrecognizable to him (and the viewer). The closing scene shows him sitting on the side of his daughter’s bed as she reads him a story in the new language… It was so sad now that I think about it.

Tags: language, office words, slang