Whence the Deck?

Here's a question: when did a Power Point presentation become known as a "deck"? This is one of those business locutions I'd never heard before in my life, and then in the last couple of weeks at least four different people must have said it to me--"oh, I'll send you our brand deck so you can see some statistics about how cool we are" and "after the meeting is over I'll send you all this deck, so you don't need to take notes right now" and "let me know if you want to see the deck I used for my presentation." What the what? All I can think is that the words "Power Point presentation"  just took to long to say, and/or perhaps conjured too many images of bad 90s graphics? Embarrassing fades between slides and animated spreadsheets that zipped into place? Who knows. I do love business-speak though. One year some friends and I all dressed up as office cliches for Halloween--I got to be Her Hair's Always On Fire About Something, someone was Herding the Cats, and someone else was Thinking Outside of the Box. Great fun. All of which is to say that I'm hard at work putting the finishing touches on my deck (the image above is the first slide) for a presentation I need to give later today. Known as pre-launch, this is where we give sneak peeks of few of our forthcoming books (in this case, Spring 2013 titles) to the sales and marketing folks. Then, in a couple of months, we'll have launch, where we present the whole list, with much fanfare, to even more people. But even for this smaller meeting one wants to put on a nice blouse and a necklace and lipstick. And one fails to write a very interesting blog post. But, hey, as we say here in officeland: It is what it is.