A re you baffled by words you hear or read every day? Does it sometimes seem as if the language is being suffocated by technological doublespeak? Is your ability to do your job, buy a computer or read a manual being undermined because whole swaths of English are now so incomprehensible they might as well be in Sanskrit? If so, you are not alone, according to a U.S.-based word-tracking outfit called the Global Language Monitor (GLM), which recently released a list of the top 10 "most confusing, yet widely used, high-tech buzzwords."

No. 1 on the list is not even a word, but a cluster of letters: the familiar HTTP. Most of us see this all the time at the start of Web addresses but have no idea that it stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, which the folks at GLM wittily point out does not mean text on too much Starbucks. They don't really say what it does mean, though, forcing us to consult a dictionary, which is hardly more helpful.

How many ordinary people tapping out e-mail want or need to know that those four letters denote "a protocol used to request and transmit files, especially Web pages and Web page components, over the Internet"? And yet there's no getting away from HTTP. As the word trackers point out, there are over 1 billion references to it on the Web alone.