Imagine that every time an engineer makes some quick-and-dirty fix to a piece of code—the sort of hack that will likely blow up one day and need to be fixed (again)—there’s an invisible ledger in which a loan is taken out against future engineering time. That engineer can borrow now to get the trains running again, but the bill will come due later, usually with interest.

If you’ve read Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys, which details the ultrafast, high-frequency trading that takes place on the stock exchange, you’ll recall his prefatory riff on a hedge fund that ran a fiber-optic cable from New York to Chicago. The goal was to shave a few milliseconds off the regular Internet route between the two financial hubs, and gain a split-second advantage over other high-frequency shops. The cost was reputedly $300 million, which indicated the stakes involved.

You can’t read an article in Wired or Fast Company, some fawning fiction about a startup’s inexorable and well-deserved charge to world domination, without reading this word at least once. A “pivot” is supposed to recall a ballerina’s demi détourné, a delicate change of course as graceful as it (hopefully) seems intentional. In reality, a startup’s pivot is a panicked sprint comparable to that of a Titanic passenger who’s spotted the last open life raft.