Wordy Wordilicious Word of the Year

My award for 2008 Wordy Wordilicious Word of the Year is:

tranche.

It describes an arcane financial instrument that symbolizes the economic collapse visited upon us by people using obscure words for even more obscure products. To round out the chimera obscura, news stories about the handout of up to $700 billion (to the guilty parties no less!) refer to the "first tranche" of the bailout, as if a French word prettifies the robbery.

One might say, "We are in the tranches encountering a tranche da vie avec la tranche l'oeil." Somesing like zat.