"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatical sentence in American English, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo. It was posted to Linguist List by Rapaport in 1992. It was also featured in Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct as an example of a sentence that is "seemingly nonsensical" but grammatical. Pinker names his student, Annie...

The following is a partial list of linguistic example sentences illustrating various linguistic phenomena. == Interaction of syntax and semantics == Syntax and meaning can interact, such that although a sentence is syntactically valid, and all of its words are meaningful, the sentence as a whole is meaningless. Examples of this type of sentence include: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. (Noam Chomsky) The gostak distims the doshes. (Andrew Ingraham.) == Ambiguity == Different types of ambiguity which are possible in language. === Lexical ambiguity === Demonstrations of words whic...

Return on investment (ROI) is the benefit to the investor resulting from an investment of some resource. A high ROI means the investment gains compare favorably to investment cost. As a performance measure, ROI is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. In purely economic terms, it is one way of considering profits in relation to capital invested. == Purpose == In business, the purpose of the "return on investment" (ROI) metric is to measure, per period, rates of return on money invested in an economic entity in order to...

SMART is a mnemonic acronym, giving criteria to guide in the setting of objectives, for example in project management, employee-performance management and personal development. The letters S and M usually mean specific and measurable. The other letters have meant different things to different authors, as described below. Additional letters have been added by some authors. SMART criteria are commonly attributed to Peter Drucker's management by objectives concept. The first-known use of the term occurs in the November 1981 issue of Management Review by George T. Doran. The principal advantage of...

Cover your ass or C.Y.A. describes activity, usually in a work-related or bureaucratic context, done by an individual to protect himself or herself from possible subsequent legal penalties or criticism. According to New York Times language expert William Safire, it describes "the bureaucratic technique of averting future policy accusations of policy error or wrongdoing by deflecting responsibility in advance". It often involves diffusing responsibility for one's actions as a form of insurance against possible future negative repercussions. It can denote a type of institutional risk-averse mentality...

A project post-mortem is a process, usually performed at the conclusion of a project, to determine and analyze elements of the project that were successful or unsuccessful. Project post-mortems are intended to inform process improvements which mitigate future risks and to promote iterative best practices. Post-mortems are often considered a key component of, and ongoing precursor to, effective risk management. == Elements of a project post-mortem == Post-mortems can encompass both quantitative data and qualitative data. Quantitative data include the variance between the hours estimated fo...

The dot-com bubble (also referred to as the dot-com boom, the Internet bubble and the information technology bubble) was a historic speculative bubble covering roughly 1997–2000 (with a climax on March 10, 2000, with the NASDAQ peaking at 5,132.52 in intraday trading before closing at 5,048.62) during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the Internet sector and related fields. While the latter part was a boom and bust cycle, the Internet boom is sometimes meant to refer to the steady commercial growth of the Internet with the advent of...