Coined by GeraldWeinberg: A lullaby word "lulls your mind into a false sense of security" yet remains ambiguous enough to allow for the opposite interpretation Examples: should ("The customer should provide the sales data by August 1" -- does this mean "must" or "might"?) just ("We'll just need to install Oracle" -- yeah, right, after just a few weeks of sweat and pain) soon very and my personal addition to the list: trivial (use 'straightforward' instead) -AlexChaffee