Akademik

adj.

Of or relating to the demise of a dot-com company.

The dot.com part of the picture has become clear to me only recently. While I used to find the child emperors repugnant, I now find them irrelevant. I admit, I used to feel righteous when a dot.com went sneakers-up, but now I feel empathy for the hardworking folks who have lost their jobs.

—James Tennermann, "Put an end to dot.com envy," InTech, August 1, 2001

There is little hope for the vast majority of the dot-com companies that were funded over the last four to five years.

More than 200 dot-coms have already gone sneakers-up. My guess is that it will be a small multiple of that this year.

—Roger McNamee, quoted in "Technology Wreckage: Yes, More To Come," The New York Times, February 11, 2001

Sneakers-up is a play on the idiom belly-up, "of or relating to a failed or bankrupt company." Replacing "belly" with "sneakers" is a reference to the relative youth of the entreprenerds who launched many of the newly-dead dot-coms.

This phrase also affords me the opportunity to unload all the words and phrases related to the ongoing dot-com slaughter that I've gathered over the past few months:

dot bomb

dot-carnage

dot-com Darwinism

dot-coma

dot-commode

dot-compost

dotcom-uppance (or dotcomuppance)

dot-dead

dot-gone

dot-goner

Not com

Thanks to subscribers Julie Felner and Mark Worden for passing along a couple of these words.