C and C++ - all at sea in a sea of seas
Another one of those geeky things that it’s just not worth asking them about. You’ll get more sense out of the dog, especially if he's been programmed.

CD-ROM – giving it spin
Old hat now in our fast moving world but the Compact Disc provided the catalyst to get away from those scratchy bits of vinyl and floppy disks (Remember either of those? I hope you do as that makes me feel a whole lot better!). A CD is read by a laser light that reflects off things called pits and lands backed by an aluminium layer, and spins a whole lot faster than those old vinyl records. The medium was invented by Philips, the company not the man, over there in the tulip fields back in the heady days of the 1980s. Sony threw in their yensworth too. 'ROM' means Read Only Memory and 'R' as in CD-R means Recordable, meaning the first you can’t record on to and the second you can.

CMYK – the mutterings of creatives
A secret code uttered between designers and printers to try to keep everyone else in the dark. A description of a colour using a percentage measurement of the four component colours Cyan Magenta Yellow Black. Cyan incidentally to you and me is blue and Magenta is red. Design work is usually formatted as CMYK for printing and refreshingly is often referred to as four-colour process or just process for short. Oh, and the strange ‘K’ for black? It really just overcomes the 2B problem of blue and black, as did using 'cyan' for blue of course.

Cockling – a trainee cockerel
The wavy or rippled effect on the surface of paper caused by humidity changes, just like all those old books you’ve got dumped at the back of your garage.

Column inches – not what you're thinking
A measure of just how successful a PR campaign has been by calculating the total column length of pieces of secured editorial.

Copyright – anathema to the glitterati subversives
The chaps in Brussels recently extended the protection of your and my creative outpourings to 70 years after death. Not that the hordes in distant lands seem too bothered. A good steady earner for lawyers, bless 'em.

Cost per click – thankful you don't speak the Xhosa language
The cost paid for every click on a search engine paid-for links to your website.

cpi – a hitherto unknown quango . . .
. . . or merely the number of printed characters that fit within a space one inch wide. Let’s leave the designers to worry about that one.

Crisis management – finding out you're down to the last bottle of gin
A pre-conceived plan to cope with an organisation's period of potential damage to its reputation should an unexpected event trigger such a crisis.

Cromalin® – giving gloss to print
A method devised by DuPont for providing a dry proof prior to printing. It uses heavy photo-like paper that provides vibrant colours which is ideal for proofing the colours in the final design. Expensive but a worthwhile process. Didn't they invent cigarette lighters too?