From ‘opening the kimono’ to ‘incentivizing’, the war against corporate buzzwords rages on
From ‘actionable synergies’ to ‘knife and fork it’, the corporate world clearly has a communication problem. Roslyn Petelin details the worst offenders in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Buzzword bingo arrived in the contemporary workplace in the early ’90s, as a way of ridiculing the prevalence of management-speak. To play it, employees prepare cards containing some of the more dreaded terms, then tick them off when their colleagues use them, which tends to be in meetings.
Many of the expressions on this bingo card are some of my least favourite. Still, they can be unpicked: an “idea sherpa” is an expert guide, to “knife and fork it” is to tackle a problem bit by bit, and “face palming” is the act of slapping one’s face as a mark of personal exasperation after making an idiotic comment.
Mai Lam/The Conversation NY-BD-CC, CC BY-SA
Please, if you are prone to buzzwords and cliches, just read George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”. It’s available on the intertubes.
Roslyn, professional writers avoid buzzwords and jargon. Sadly, many managers know not what they do. Such as the difference between clear concise writing and abstract waffle. Jargon and buzzwords infect business and government communications. Spread by people who approve such nonsense because they know no better.
IDEATION, please, please never again….
All buzzwords and phrases will pass, but there are two that we hear in everyday speech and the on-air pronouncements of otherwise informed people that have been around for too long now: ‘so’ as an opener to any spoken paragraph, and ‘like’ as reliably repeated impediment to the completion of a sentence containing an idea.
Those aren’t buzzwords. They don’t obfuscate meaning; they have no meaning at all. People use them out of habit, to get or keep the mouth moving while they think about the important parts. They’re just a replacement for “um” or “uh”.
I’ve been out of corporate for four years, and I’ve been living in Hong Kong for the past two, so I am well out of the loop when it comes to death by buzzwords in boardrooms. Some of these are pretty funny though, like ‘Idea Sherpa’ and ‘Open the kimono’!
In defence of the buzzwords, I don’t think it’s all their fault. It’s usually the dude in the room who is trying to sell you stuff you don’t need that lays this stuff on thick and ruins it for everyone.
An executives use of buzzwords is in inverse proportion to their ability.