Editorial: A no-calorie, high-risk snack

Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2005 | 8:53 a.m.

More than 44 percent of American workers spend time "infosnacking" each day, but it's not the kind of grazing that contributes to the nation's ever-increasing waistlines.

"Infosnacking" has been dubbed the 2005 Word of the Year by Webster's New World College Dictionary, and it means "checking e-mail, Googling sports scores, shopping online and surfing the latest headlines" while at work.

The word "hasn't caught on yet," Mike Agnes, Webster's chief editor, told Cox News Service. But the act of infosnacking certainly has. A joint poll by America Online and Salary.com released earlier this year showed surfing the Internet while at work was the top time-wasting activity of American employees.

The poll, presumably conducted online, showed that the average American employee admitted to sending personal e-mail, shopping, playing online games or surfing headlines for two hours of each day at work. That's twice the amount of time that corporate human resource managers estimated their workers infosnacked.

The fact that the word isn't dropped regularly by The New York Times or on CNN is of no consequence to Webster's judges, Agnes said. "We try to choose a word that tickles our linguistic funny bone or is significant in the way language reflects culture," he told Cox News.

Fun to say and even more fun to do, infosnacking likely loses its luster, however, when the boss finds out.