New Vocabulary

Language is always changing as we all look for the best ways to express our thoughts. I have two new words to share today and also one that I'm looking to for suggestions on a replacement. These are "radish holes", "friends-in-law", and an alternative for "roller coaster".

Photo by Martin Kozák via Wikimedia Commons

Note: I drafted this post back in April 2026 before receiving an offer for my new job. It's time to finally edit and post.

Radish Holes

I ran across the term "radish holes" in a recent Economist article [gift link] as a term used in China to describe jobs for describe job postings that are posted, but but they're not looking for candidates: they already have someone selected.

As someone in the job market, I suspect that many of the roles I apply for are radish holes. These include openings with very short open periods - in less than a week they've already disappeared from the website - or ones with extremely specific requirements that are very unlikely to fit more than one person. I get it: sometimes you want to give someone a new position and official policy is that openings should be posted. But it is frustrating for people outside the company or outside that situation: we know that we put the work into applying for something that is irrelevant.

A common piece of advice I received when from several jobhunting resources is that the vast majority of jobs are found through networking and not through responding to job postings. So although radish holes are a problem for everyone who is looking, they are also the dream: to network into someone who has the power to create a position for the job-seeker. May we all have a radish hole that fits us precisely.

Friends-in-Law

This is a term that my wife and I coined and I wanted to put down a marker of saying, "Hey I've created this!" in case it catches on. It might already exist; I'm scared to do a web search to find out.

A "friend-in-law" is a friend that comes from your spouse's side or is the spouse of a friend. So if your spouse is friends with someone from high school, they are your friend-in-law: you are also friends with them. Even better if your spouse has a friend from high school and then you are also friends (or friendly) with that friend's spouse, which I guess makes it a double friend-in-law or a friend-in-law-in-law.

Roller Coaster

I have on many occasions described my job hunt as a "roller coaster". By that I mean there are some weeks where I feel like everything is clicking and my job offer is days or hours away, and there are times where suddenly everything is a rejection and I'm worried there might be might soon be nothing in the job hunt funnel at all. So there are definitely ups and downs and the common analogy is a roller coaster.

One day I thought, "Maybe I can post my roller-coaster status, like today is an "up" day, today is a "down" day." And I began to wonder, "Wait...which one is which?"

When talking to people about how my job search is going, I might talk about having "up" days or "down" days and in those cases the "up" day is a day when everything is going well and the "down" day is when I get tons of rejections. BUT on a roller coaster the "up" is the slow boring climb that you take in order to finally get to the exciting "down" that is the point of the roller coaster, so the metaphor doesn't work.

I am now on a quest to find a replacement analogy for how my days are going. I spent some time brainstorming and come up with nothing that I like. I've done some searching on the internet and I found lots of results about "what does a roller coaster mean as an analogy?" "Is this an analogy or a metaphor?" "How is life like a roller coaster?" But I have not found a good replacement. So if anyone has a great metaphor for life where "down" is bad, "up" is good (I am willing to flex on up/down = good/bad), I would love to hear it.

In the meantime, I hope that your days are "up" and that your vocabulary is expanded.