Many news articles detailing last month's Hewlett-Packard boardroom spying scandal explained pretexting as "using fraud or deceit to obtain personal records." Perhaps because the definition was given, look-ups for this word were few. This is just as well, because, in case you were wondering, this fraudulent sense of pretext is not well enough established to have earned a spot in the dictionary just yet. However, it keeps company with other jargon used by folks whose job it is to look for information.

For instance, Dumpster diving refers to rummaging through trash in order to obtain confidential information; shoulder surfing includes various forms of eavesdropping; and steganography names the process of hiding secret data inside public or unprotected data. The word steganography was once used interchangeably with cryptography, but that usage is now considered archaic; the other terms have yet to be well enough established in the lexicon to earn a place in the dictionary.