In the sixth grade, I knew a girl who read dictionaries for fun. While other kids ran around during recess, kicking their hacky sacks—do they still have those?—and rubbing dirt into each other’s hair, this girl sat under a tree, her eyes skimming over individual definitions and sample sentences, reveling in whatever illumination she found there.

We snickered at her and continued playing what could loosely be interpreted as kickball—not sure we made as good a use of our time as her. Last I heard, she’s running a highly successful engineering consulting firm, which leads me to a general conclusion about my own field: sometimes in the wide world of web analytics it’s good to take a second and review the terminology. And especially if you’ve never taken the time to understand the jargon bantered about by the kids down in the IT basement, here’s a crash course on the relevant techno-slang.