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If you've heard Faith Popcorn's name even once, you're not likely to have forgotten it. Talk about branding! She's "an internationally respected forecaster of consumer trends," the dustjacket of her new book reminds us, "and a key advisor to many Fortune 500 companies"; among her clients are Bell Atlantic, BMW, Cigna, McDonald's, and Procter & Gamble. (I wonder what her take on Enron was.) In short, we're not talking about horoscopes.

The new book, written with Adam Hanft, is Dictionary of the Future: The Words, Terms, and Trends That Define the Way We'll Live, Work, and Talk, just out from Hyperion. Popcorn and Hanft have identified and defined up-and-coming words and terms in a variety of fields, supplemented by more speculative entries for words and terms they predict will come into use. And a few of the entries, they note, are for words that are not at all new but are generally not well understood or are becoming newly relevant.

The definitions, discursive and even chatty rather than in the terse mode favored by lexicographers, are arranged according to subject in 35 categories, from Aging to Transportation, with stops along the way for Biology and Biotechnology, Crime and Terrorism, Fashion and Style, Health and Medicine, and so on. Most of the categories are standard, but some are not: Fear, Frustration, and Desire, for instance. Each category come with a mini-introduction surveying the territory.

This is irresistible stuff, whatever its value to marketing mavens. "Virtual Immigrants," for instance, are "technology workers who serve U.S. companies from their native countries—such as China, Russia, and the Philippines—where they must remain because of immigration restrictions . …Imagine the economic impact in these countries when you have some people making $35 an hour working for a U.S. company, and others making $35 a week working for a local one." Actually, despite such significant differences in pay, it's lower costs and greater flexibility for the U.S. companies, rather than immigration restrictions, that primarily account for this phenomenon. But Popcorn and Hanft are surely right to identify it as a prime example of "the efficiency—and complexity—of globalization," with implications that are not only economic.

Some of terms seem to identify trends that exist mostly in a few blocks on New York, in not solely in the imagination of the trendspotters. "Couch Surfers," for instance, are "a group of young men who have everything except a place to live. As the New York Timesdefines it, these 'yuppie vagabonds' are 'a nomadic subculture of young professionals in their late 20's, 30's, and even 40's who appear to live normal, prosperous lives but in fact are couch-surfers who rely on the kindness of friends, seek shelter in their sports utility vehicles, or list about in all-night coffee shops.' " This sounds like a Saturday Night Live parody, but Popcorn and Hanft offer it straight.

B&C readers will be disappointed by the section on Religion and Spirituality, both because it's so skimpy—surprisingly, it's one of the shortest sections in the book—and because the entries are rather lame. The very first term in this section is "Church Planting," defined as "the practice by which evangelical congregations establish multiple small groups of core worshippers who then 'grow' into full-fledged churches." Here Popcorn and Hanft seem to have taken a venerable term and applied it rather fuzzily to one aspect of the church-growth movement. Their unfamiliarity with the subject is glaring.

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February (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46