i will talk about a new family of generating functions labelled by affine permutations which are affine analogues of stanley symmetric functions. these functions are related to the reduced words of affine permutations. i'll give some basic properties of these functions and conjecture other properties. as applications, i will show how these functions are related the k-schur functions of lapointe, lascoux and morse as well as the cylindric schur functions of postnikov. finally i will discuss conjectural relationships between these functions and the cohomology of the affine flag variety.