Astonishing.

In a down economy–one in which Challenger, Gray and Christmas expects some 180,000 tech sector jobs to be lost–career and workplace chatter is more likely to include the word “layoff” than not. That’s the word from Glassdoor.com, a site that collects insider reports on the salaries, work conditions and workplace attitudes of employees at companies around the country.

In fact, according to Glassdoor, the percentage of employee comments mentioning layoffs has grown six out of the last eight months, increasing some 64.2 percent from a low of 2.8 percent in April to a high of 4.6 percent in November. Says Glassdoor, “We searched company reviews on Glassdoor.com for various forms of the word ‘layoff’ and found that the percentage of reviews that mention ‘layoff’ has increased sharply, particularly with employees at AOL/Time Warner, Sprint Nextel and Alcatel-Lucent.”

So there’s an uptick in employee mentions of the word “layoff” at companies destined for them.

In other news, all brontosauruses are thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle and then, thin again at the far end….