Ducking

From Jeff Atwood's blog (contributed by user Kyoryu)

A duck is a feature added to a product solely to draw attention and be removed thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the project.

This started as a piece of Interplay corporate lore. It was well known that producers (a game industry position, roughly equivalent to PMs) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't adding value.

The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation.

Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, "that looks great. Just one thing - get rid of the duck."

Bike-shedding

*AKA the law of triviality*

Whenever a committee meets to discuss something important, people like to feel like they are contributing. A lot of times, they don't have the expertise to contribute to the big idea, so they end up arguing over smaller, pointless details they can wrap their heads around.

The name comes from a committee to approve spending for a nuclear power plant that spends the entire time arguing about what color to paint the bicycle shed. The proposed design of the plant is both more important and more complex to grasp.

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved." A reactor is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it, so one assumes that those who work on it understand it. However, everyone can visualize a cheap, simple bicycle shed, so planning one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to implement their own proposal and demonstrate personal contribution.

Water Supply

From This American Life on this Onion article

This is shorthand for having to justify a good idea in whatever way you must to get it past editorial. This headline is funny on its own, but they had to dress it up like it's about finance misappropriation to get it in.

No, no, no. Don't get me wrong. I like the silly jokes. I just have to think them through and find out what they're saying. Like I remember there was a joke, "Thirsty mayor drinks entire town's water supply." And just kept saying, why? What is it? Thirst guy drinks a whole lake? What's funny about that? It's just silly. It's silly in a way that isn't funny. And they're like, no, no. You have to trust us. Because he's the thirsty mayor. He drinks the whole town.

And they were trying to explain it to me. I just didn't get it. And then finally it clicked in my head. And I said oh, I get it. It's about misappropriation of public resources by a corrupt ruling oligarchy, or whatever. And then everyone made fun of me. Like, "Oh, yeah. That's what it's about. It's not just silly." Well, of course it's silly. But it has something to say, and that's why it's funny. That's what I think.

I just don't think jokes that don't have anything to say are that funny. If you can't find something legitimate to say within the context of the joke, no matter how silly it is, I don't see the point of it.