Or how about a light-year? Is that shorter of longer than a calendar year? An anomalistic year? A Besselian Year? A tropical year? A lunar year? A Julian year? A sidereal year?
And parsec. Don't get me started. How many people who love the sound of that word can define it?
I'm agnostic (that means I reserve judgment for those of you from Loma Linda) about "goes ballistic". That's because I actually use that term in my quotidian (oops, A long word. Bad Lonesome!) professional life and because I was present at what may have been its birth as a colloquialism. As all Freepers know, a missile "goes ballistic" when it enters the "free fall" portion of its trajectory, when it is only influenced by inertia, gravity and perhaps air resistance. It is a gentle portion of the trajectory compared to 11 g's of rocket thrust and scores of g's of reentry shock.
So I'm standing in the hall listening to two contractors from TRWonderful mentioning an encounter with a manager who took his management style from Attila the Hun, only without the horses and sense of humor. So one says to the other, "I mentioned the $5,000,000 overrun and it was at about that time that Roy went ballistic." Soon after that "to go ballistic" entered the vernacular, displacing the older term, "to go non-linear."