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Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (adjective)
[VAY-pahr-ahs] 
1. resembling or characteristic of vapor; 'vaporous cloud'
2. producing vapors; volatile: "My father's vaporous coffee thermos would fill the truck's cab with steam as soon as it was opened."
3. filled with or obscured by vapors; 'a vaporous bog'
4. ethereal or insubstantial; vain; vague; 'vaporous speculations'
5. fanciful or ridiculous; 'vaporous conjecture'
noun forms: vaporosity, vaporousness
adverb form: vaporously
Origin:
Approximately 1527; borrowed perhaps from Old French, 'vaporeux,' and directly from Latin, 'vaporosus': full of vapor, from 'vapor': vapor. In action:
"For example, there we were -- a drowsy crocodile, a wandering piglet and me -- watching the sunset at Cob�, a town located by an ancient Mayan city about two and a half hours through the jungle from Cancun. It was too early for serious drinking, and it was too hot and hypnotic -- what with the sky on fire and all -- to read, so I walked down Lake Coba's grassy bank to a short wharf that terminated in a small thatch-roofed pavilion. From there I could see the entire lake, its polished surface only occasionally disturbed by a jumping fish or prowling caiman. At one end the peak of a Mayan pyramid, called La Iglesia, towered over the jungle. The full moon rising behind it created a garish glow that made the whole scene look like a painting you'd find in an art gallery in Las Vegas. In the opposite direction, the over-ripe mango sun was descending behind a 40-story cumulonimbus that the gods -- who never miss a trick -- had given the shape of a serpent's head, complete with a long vaporous tongue whipping the lush horizon. It was a singular sight (the vivid reflection in the lake turned it into the world's largest Rorschach image) that even a confirmed skeptic would have to admit bore an uncanny resemblance to Kukulcan, the feathered-serpent Mayan god whom the Mexicans call Quetzalcoatl."
Douglas Cruickshank. "Mayan Dreaming," Salon.com (January 6, 1998).
"Yet for years, the professional life of Dan Klores depended, or so it seemed, on projecting precisely the opposite quality: keeping cool when the heat is high on people just about everyone has heard of. He is a public relations man, a marketer, a guardian of image.
Klores spoke for Sean (Puffy) Combs when he got arrested with a loaded gun on the front seat of a car and a sullen Jennifer Lopez in the back; for Steven Seagal, the actor, when he found himself splashed by some gangsterism on the edges of his circle; and now for Jennifer Lopez herself, several years after her ride in Puffy's S.U.V. and many escalations up the ranks of divadom. For markets that trade in the vaporous currency of celebrity, Dan Klores functions the way Alan Greenspan does with hard cash for the Federal Reserve.
Klores's gift for modulation -- a valuable trait, considering the strict requirement that at least one celebrity a day be strapped onto Page Six of The New York Post and fed to the crows -- has raised quite a nice roof over his head in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York and provided him with a smashing beach residence in Long Island and partial ownership of two restaurants in midtown Manhattan, among other assets."
Jim Dwyer. "Autobiography of a Flack," The New York Times (August 24, 2003).
"The Vaporware 'winners' were chosen by the people who matter most to tech firms -- the ordinary men and women who have been told that the products are on the way, but who have so far seen neither hide-nor-hair of said innovations. During the past month, we received, as usual, hundreds of votes for vaporware products -- but we had to throw out more than a few of those, unfortunately, because the suggested products didn't qualify.
'Vaporware,' in our book, is a thing that was promised but never delivered. And no matter how much you hated Windows XP and/or Mac OS X, you can't call those products vapor, either. They made it to shelves.
Speaking of Microsoft, some smart-aleck readers opined that the most vaporous thing in tech last year was the Justice Department's failure to deliver on its promise to punish Bill Gates for his company's monopolistic misdeeds -- but we thought that a bit of a stretch."
Farhad Manjoo. "Vaporware 2001: Empty Promises," Wired News (January 7, 2002).
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