Looking at the developments in the business world, this can safely be called the era of the cherry picker. A cherry picker is a person who picks out the best out of any selection. The noun comes from the cherry picker, which is a hydraulic crane with a platform at the end, for raising and lowering people working at a height, sometimes also used for raising a person to a position of advantage for picking the best fruit on a tree.

When companies began to diversify in the 1980s, cherry-picking as the term for an activity in the business world entered the lexis. Today, it has taken on an additional sense: a cherry picker may now be a person who selects favourable facts and figures in order to present biased data. The changes in the world of commerce have created many such neologisms and here are some of them.

Rapid profits demand short-termism or concentration on short-term projects for immediate profit at the expense of long-term security. Noticed around the mid-eighties, it is used mainly as a critical term for economic or managerial practices that are seen to provide immediate but ephemeral benefits at the expense of long-term security. A similar concept is adhocracy, that is a flexible organisational system designed to be responsive to the needs of the moment. Coined from the Latin phrase ad hoc, adhocracy was first popularised by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock.

The early 1980s brought the ‘feel good’ factor to refer to anything that created a feeling of financial and material well-being in people. ‘Feel good’ owes its origin to Dr Feelgood, which was the name adopted in 1962 by the pianist William Perryman, who broadcast and recorded under this name. Much later, feel good came to be used for any physician who provided short-term palliatives rather than an effective cure. The early 1990s created ‘feel bad’ (words reflect life), through analogy with ‘feel good’. The feel bad factor is used to refer to any scenario that contradicts the connotations of financial and material well-being.