Etc...

WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY?

Spell it with lower-case letters and a hyphen, and yo-yo is a toy. Spell it with caps, though, and it becomes a popular e-mail acronym meaning you're on your own. Ah, but it doesn't end there. YOYO now has found its way into common usage in business meetings – often to the puzzlement of folks attending them. And it's only one of many, such as BTDT (been there, done that) and EOD (end of discussion). A new poll of 1,000 workers by British recruitment firm Office Angels found two-thirds of respondents had heard the terms, but didn't know what they mean and were embarrassed to ask. Such a CWOT (complete waste of time)!

If you haven't heard, later this month a new shearing method is to be introduced commercially for sheep in Australia, the world's No. 1 producer of wool. They'll be fitted with nets and injected with a special protein that causes them to shed their fleece without being clipped by sweaty farmhands.

Apparel and manufacturing workers were the most often "downsized" over the past decade, an analysis by the Washington-based Employment Policy Foundation shows. National security also saw big job cuts – although that trend is reversing since last Sept. 11. The 10 US industries with the most job cuts between 1992 and January 2002 (with numbers in parentheses) according to the Employment Policy Foundation:

1. Apparel (490,000)
2. Private household services (334,000)
3. Electrical equipment manufacturing (254,000)
4. National Security (245,000)
5. Paper manufacturing (231,000)
6. Machinery manufacturing (221,000)
7. Mining (218,000)
8. Professional equipment manufacturing (213,000)
9. Utilities (205,000)
10. Transport equipment manufacturing (196,000)