As I index Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text in my wiki, I’m picking up some really useful words. I’m going to add them to this post as I find them, and wherever possible I’ll link them up to wikipedia:

• Atopy/atopic: Atopy (Greek atopia – placelessness, unclassifiable, of high originality; Socrates has often been called “átopos”) describes the ineffability of things or emotions that are seldom experienced, that are outstanding and that are original in the strict sense. The term depicts a certain quality (of experience) that can be observed within oneself or within others. Application: some of the most important qualities of a design are atopic (have je ne sais quois). The same is true of the qualities of situations and informants in design research (you just have to be there to really get what it’s like). Finally, the most compelling aspect of brands are atopic, and exist despite formal brand identity guidelines and the brand cops who enforce them. But, because business is so objective, explicit and verbal, and because the majority of interactions in the business world are mediated entirely by explicit language and numbers, especially across hierarchical strata in an organization, the atopic realities that make the difference between “eh” and “awesome” are lost, strained out or dismissed).
• Sociolect: In sociolinguistics, a sociolect or social dialect is a variety of language (a dialect) associated with a social group such as a socioeconomic class, an ethnic group, an age group, etc. Application: one of the major obstacles to inter-disciplinary collaboration is difference in sociolects, which at best introduce a learning curve, and at worst constitute professional shibboleths. Also, an organization’s sociolect sometimes differs from that of its customers — which, again, at best interferes with understanding, but at worse marks company and customer as belonging to two different worlds of meaning, which alienates.
• I wish I had a third. A two-item list is really lame. This line is here solely to create the illusion that there are three items in this two-item list.