Learn the Lingo (General Finance)

I know at least some people out there are going into finance. You're going to get there and not understand half the things people say. Maybe this will help a little. I'll do three of these. One for general finance, one for banking, one for sales/trading. The general finance one will focus on the terms used to describe the players in the finance industry and terms used ubiquitously. The banking/trading specific ones will focus on terms used in each business. If anyone in the industry wants to correct anything, feel free:

Security: some sort of financial instrument, be it a stock, bond, option, etc. . .
Derivative: type of security that "derives" it's value from another security
Banker: someone in the investment banking side of things, someone who has access to private information about companies' intentions and spends ridiculous hours working. These people deal with the legal and financial implications of transactions a company needs to make to produce funding, acquire companies, merge companies, etc.
M&A: Mergers and Acquisitions, a special part of investment banking that deals specifically with the merger of companies or acquisitions of companies (other banking involves producing funding options for companies like loans, debt offerings and stock offerings).
Trader: someone who trades securities for the firm
Market maker: a special type of trader who's job it is to "make a market." It is his job to quote a price for anything (within his mandate) someone might want to trade with him and trade it at that price regardless of whether he wants to do the trade or not.
Salesperson: someone who talks to clients, usually to generate trading business
Structurer: Structurers are special kinds of traders and/or bankers. They either put together "structures" of securities to fit clients needs, or they put together deals that turn into special structured securities to fit clients needs.
Originator: These people are essentially sales people on the debt side who produce deals (usually loans) for the structurers to securitize (turn into a security) and the traders to sell off.
Broker: someone who acts as a pass-through agent for trading.
Specialist: someone who is actually in the trading pit (i.e. at the NYSE) and takes orders and matches up the buys and sells. Obviously this only applies to physical exchanges, electronic exchanges dont' have specialists.
Flow: can refer to deal flow or trading flow, basically the volume of business passing through a given desk.
Private Wealth / Wealth Management: Basically an asset management area specifically for wealthy people. Clients of a wealth management arm of a bank usually have excess of a million (in some banks over 10 million) dollars.
Back/middle/front office: these are value terms. Back office usually refers to operations (technology, data entry, etc), front office usually refers to revenue generating people (traders, salespeople, bankers, structurers), middle office is anything in between (programmers, P&L reporters, etc).
Quants: the geeks of the realm. These guys know their math/stat and are usually used to find the correct price of things on the market.
Private/Public side: Private side of the bank knows stuff that the outside world is not allowed to know (bankers, structurers, originators, etc). The public side is not allowed to know stuff the private side knows about because they can take advantage of it (traders, brokers, etc).
Compliance: there are a TON of legal hassles to make sure the private side of the bank and the public side of the bank do not interact and allow for illegal trading. Compliance is the verb for staying in the legal bounds and the noun for the people who make sure you do.
Buy/Sell side: Buy side refers to asset managers, proprietary traders, private equity and the like, people who buy things for their own portfolios. Sell side refers to people in the investment bank who have to bend over backwards to fulfill their sell side clients' needs. Institutional Investor - usually refers to large clients that transact in large volume. Most commonly these are mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, etc.
Comp: compensation, usually refers to the year end bonus. This is why people are in this game, for the most part.
Headhunter: people who specialize in matching qualified candidates with open jobs.

That's all I can think of for now. Unfortunately it looks like I'm heavily weighted on the trading side. I don't know if that's because I'm on the trading side or because the banking side just doesn't involve as many titles (plus who needs to define to whom "legal" refers?).