Blast Fax

[Gareth Branwyn]

Paul McFedries wrote:

>The shiny new Lexis-Nexis Universe boasts no less than 49 citations for
>"blast fax", including the following from the Feb. 99 edition of a
>publication called "Successful Meetings":
>
>     Sometimes called mass fax, blast fax, bulk fax,
>     or -- unkindly enough -- junk fax, broadcast fax
>     does exactly what the name implies. You send your
>     material to a service specializing in this task,
>     either as a computer file or as a paper document.
>     The service will then distribute your material to
>     each and every fax number you give them.
>
>I'm going to put this one on my Word Spy to-do list.
>
>Paul
>Books: http://www.mcfedries.com/books/
>Word Spy: http://www.logophilia.com/WordSpy/

Thanks to Paul and George Cole for doing some poking around on this. I
saw this May 10 Newsweek citation yesterday while in a doctor's waiting
room. I was blinded by anger at the time, thanks to an HMO administrative
screw-up right out of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, so I may have read it
wrong. Can someone here with Lexis-Nexis look up "blast fax" in that
issue and post the cite? They may have misunderstood the term and
assigned it a negative and political connotation it does not normally
have.


Another term I saw yesterday (in Inter at ctive Week, 6/7/99):

"truck roll"
Phone company slang for a technician's visit to a customer's location.
Used in connection with a new high-speed (DSL) Internet connection
technology that would eliminate the need for a "truck roll" to each new
DSL subscriber.



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GARETH BRANWYN
Jargon Watch editor, Wired
Author of _Jargon Watch: A Pocket Dictionary for the Jitterati_
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