The Wall Street Journal reaches perhaps unprecedented levels of taxonomic analysis today with a page-one item about the emergence of "bucket" as a business term. Seems that, in the exec vernacular, "bucket" is now being used to describe company units, revenue sources, markets — in short, anything that can be grouped, categorized, or partitioned. It's used as a verb ("to bucket" a guy is to assign him a place), as an adjective ("the investor is looking for something buckety," as in big and solid), and pretty much as a substitute for any other word in the language. "Silo" is gone. "Block" is so nineties. It's all about the bucket. Buckety bucket bucket!

The clincher, however, is one of those famed WSJ dot drawings that accompanies the text. For what we suspect is the first time in the newspaper's history, it depicts — we'll let the caption speak for itself.

Business Types Get a New Kick Out of the 'Bucket' [WSJ]