Does a Binfluencer Have a Binsta?

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. And here’s a word I have my eye on.

I’ve seen it popping up occasionally, usually in the British press.

And that word is binfluencer.

Who is a binfluencer? What are we talking about here?

Well, a binfluencer is the first person on your street to put the trash in the recycling bins out.

Out, you know, according to which ones are supposed to be collected that week so that everybody knows and sort of follows suit.

So much room for mischief there, just to put them all out or the wrong ones out just to make the whole streak.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I mean, we have one on our street for sure.

I’m sure you do as well.

And this term has also been applied more generally to someone who encourages recycling and minimizing trash.

I really like it.

I have come around on the word influencer. I didn’t like it at first, but I’m starting to dig it.

But I really like Benfluencer because I know the one on our street.

Well, you know that I also track new language.

And Martha, you also know that I worked for a long time in information technology.

But let me ask you, if knowing these things about me, if you and I worked for, say, Google, and we were talking about a lake house, what would you think we were talking about?

A lake house? I would think that was what you bought with all your earnings.

Like a secluded cabin overlooking Lake Tahoe or something.

Where you escaped on the weekends.

Yeah. But in fact, in the tech world, a lake house is a facility or a system that holds a data lake.

And a data lake is a large body of disorganized, unsorted data.

Oh.

Yeah, and that is a play on data warehouse, which is typically more structured data.

And this comes back to about 2010.

And this fellow named James Dixon, who was a data technologist at the time, he described it kind of instead of being more like bottled water, which is packaged and processed, it’s more like a natural body of water.

This data that just flows in kind of raw, unsorted, unorganized, waiting for you to do something with it.

And, of course, if you have data lakes that are disorganized to such a degree you can’t do anything with them, they’re called data swamps.

Oh.

See, I thought a data lake would evaporate up into the cloud.

But no.

No, it doesn’t.

So you have the lake house, which is the facility that stores the data lake.

That’s nice.

It sounds more exciting than it is, unfortunately.

So if you get that tech job, Martha, and they start taking you to the Lake House, they’re going to take you out to some big place with lots of computers whirring in the darkness.

I’m going to be disappointed then, in other words.

You are going to be very disappointed.

Probably going to have a nice paycheck, but disappointed.

Many of you, when you read, you make those word lists, and then you look them up later.

We’d love to hear what you’re looking up.

What is that word that caught your eye that you just have to share with us?

Let us know what’s the crazy new language that you’re finding.

Send it to us, words@waywordradio.org, or just share your thoughts, ideas, words, or questions.

words@waywordradio.org.

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