Is “laser-focused” a new word?

Question

I found the word “laser-focused on the bottom line” in the following sentence of the New York Times (August 6) op ed titled, “Dream, Baby, Dream!”

“We also know – look at Syria – dictators who have spent decades ruling through fear do not go quietly into the night any more than great powers readily abandon their profitable dominions. And I thought these finance guys were hard-nosed realists laser-focused on the bottom line.

Dream on, Mitt, dream on! Even if your dreams, to use that word you let drop on the Olympics in London and then scrambled to retract, are “disconcerting.”

I think laser-focused simply means “pinpointed” or “sharply focused.” It doesn’t seem to be any foreign word to me. However, curiously enough, this apparently easy-to-relate word is not found in any of Oxford, Cambridge, and Merriam-Webster online dictionary, or in Ngram inventory.

Other online vocabulary site e.g. www.wordnik.com says 'laser-focused' hasn't been added to any lists yet.

But I found the catch phrase, “Wal-Mart ‘gets laser-focused’ on lowest prices again” in DailyFinance.

Is laser-focused a received English word, or a business jargon, or just an up-and-coming word?

Answer 1

I used Google books to see if I could figure out how quickly this phrase is catching on, and how long it's been in widespread use. That's difficult to ascertain, because a great majority of the time, “laser focused” is found in a scientific journal, and is referring to, well, focused lasers – i.e., stuff like this:

A 50-mW laser focused into a cell with a 10-cm focal length lens is no more effective than a 5-mW laser focused with a 1-cm focal length lens.

By the year 2005, though, metaphorical use the phrase crops up more and more; I'd venture a guess that, by that time, using laser-focused to describe someone's mind or concentration was no longer novel or uncommon. As you might imagine, the phrase shows up quite a few times in the very unscientific 2006 book Focus Like a Laser Beam: 10 Ways to Do What Matters Most; a blogger headlined a 2009 entry with Steve Jobs Is Laser Focused on the Apple Tablet.

The earliest entry I could find to this more metaphorical usage of the term was in a 1995 book called The Kennedy Women by Laurence Leamer:

(I'm not insisting that's the first use of the term, I'm just saying that's the earliest one I could find, after spending 10 minutes or so leafing through the search results. Nonetheless, it's interesting how Leamer chose to hyphenate the two-word term, but, fourteen years later, the blogger did not. That fits what some have said in other ELU threads: early uses of a newly-coined phrase are often hyphenated, while that hyphen tends to get dropped as the usage becomes more widespread.)

My final answer? Ten years ago, I might have said that laser-focused was an up-and-coming word, but today, I think it's more deeply rooted and firmly established.

Answer 2

Whether or not it's in common usage (it is), it's a phrase. :P I've been seeing this for years, so I'd assert quite strongly that this is in common usage.

HOWEVER, the science pedant in me insists on pointing out that lasers are not, in fact, focused! Focusing electromagnetic signals works by taking divergent information and bouncing or curving it so that it converges, strengthening or sharpening the signal. Lasers don't really have divergent information - all of the photons are emitted with the same direction and wavelength.

Focusing white light versus "focusing" a laser would be a bit like trying to funnel a splash versus trying to funnel water from a water gun. One will be focused by the lens/funnel, one comes out already focused.

Focusing light is a process. A laser's direction exists as a constant state of being.

In most day-to-day life, you're going to encounter unfocused lasers. These lasers are created cohesive and need no focusing. In some applications, there are lasers that are focused. These tend to be pretty rad applications like weapons, surgical tools, and physics labs.

Thank you J.R. for the correction.

Answer 3

It is an example of "a turn of phrase". A descriptive phrase to provide an alternate or more expressive way to say something.

Granted for the anal or pedantic, lasers are made up of parallel light waves so can't technically be focused. But to most of us it refers to concentrated light turned on to a normally very small spot.