“I think Ford will fall apart. They have just made too many bets on the wrong things. A bunch of the institutions that we rely on currently will, to some degree, decompose.” — John Elkington of the consulting firm Sustainability,  quoted in “Big Foot,” Michael Specter, The New Yorker, 2/25/2008This is my short list. I had to work hard not to turn this into a glossary of the downturn (staycation, stagflation, etc.).I’m fortunate that the worst of these terms are happening around me, not to me, but I did feel very uncomfortable when I stopped by a shed store yesterday and walked through a very nice shed that turned out to be a “repo.” That’s my index of hard times: when we start seeing foreclosures on sheds.Oh, and for phrases on the way out? I submit “flat-panel TV.” Try buying one that isn’t!Top Ten Words and Phrases for 2008Presearch: the informal Google/Wikipedia look-ups students do before digging into better resources  (and yes, they do that! More about that in a future post about Project Information Literacy)Tweet: A post on the microblogging site, Twitter. (Hardly a new term, but when I saw Twitter on the front page of the New York Times, I knew it deserved a mention.)Long photo: A very short video, possibly first defined by Flickr, but moving into general usage through the ease and popularity of creating and uploading short video commentary to sites such as YouTube and Amazon. …

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