Fads for using various words and phrases seem to come and go in software companies. One month they're in and everyone's using them, the next they're out. Maybe a boss starts using a particular word or phrase and suddenly everyone's at it. It's probably the same in other industries as well. While I was in Redmond I heard a couple of new ones that seem to be popular at Microsoft at the moment.

The first is performant, as in writing performant code or we have put a lot of effort into making the framework perfomant. It looks like it means performs well though Google doesn't have a definition for it. Here's a post from 1999 claiming a French origin for the word and there's even a company founded in 2000 that calls its self Performant.

The other phrase I heard a lot was take a dependency, as in we'll be taking a dependency on the CLR project. Of course this means dependent, but uses more words.

Where I work the current favourite is socialize, as in we'll be socializing this message with the other groups. Just means talk about or discuss with.

A few years ago out of pocket was popular to mean out of touch, as in she'll be out of pocket when she's at the client site next week. I thinks this is currently declining in popularity. Here's a post discussing it arising at least 25 years ago.