Writing, marketing and technology
BBC Magazine has a great list of 50 buzz phrases to avoid, including:
Plus I heard a new one the other day (from two different sources): “socialise” meaning to share an idea with colleagues and see what they think. Or perhaps I should say “run it up the flag pole and see who salutes it.”
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Matthew Stibbe is CEO of Articulate Marketing and Turbine, the easy, online way to deal with office paperwork. He edits Golf Hotel Whiskey and writes the Forbes Aviator column.
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Hi Matthew – haven’t touched base for a while! Just wanted to say that going forward, you should drill down on more posts that target low-hanging fruit like this.
C’mon – without cliches, hype, corporatespeak and consultant “doubleplusgood” buzzwords, commerce as we know it would grind to a halt while most of us searched for new words to justify our existences.
I myself am about to sit down to a value-added, low-hanging, Web-2.0 conversant, granular conversation on the phone. Don’t try to stop me.
JSML.
Job Security Markup Language.
Very good!
You forgot the absolute worst of all: ‘deliverables!’
My phobia is ‘traction’ – unless in the context of a Land Rover
I’ve got two major clichés that I hate, and those are “proactive” and “reaching out to the consumers.” If someone says that their “brand has developed a proactive outreach,” I’m ready to kill…
Absolutely. And sometimes it’s so easy to slip into using them. I’ve noticed myself using the dread word ‘Solutions’ recently. Ouch!
Testing comment replies.
I’ve heard that “visibility” is doing the rounds in a certain consultancy.
“Did they have visibility on that?” means “Did they get a chance to see it?” (in other words, “Were they copied in on the email?”)
Corporate AND blame-surferish – nasty!
Yes, ‘visibility’ is another classic. Thanks for sharing!
A while back I wrote a very similar post on this same topic. A few days later I received a “talking to” because many of the individuals in my PR firm regularly used the terms I highlighted.
Needless to say, I don’t work there any longer.
Luckily I work for a boss who agrees with me 100% on everything I say!
But seriously, your former employees were idiots.
You’ve missed a good few here. One that I’m finding most irritating at the moment is ‘transparency’ – “we’re building transparency into our customer experience”. I used to like ‘counselling’ as a nicer word for boll***ing…
In the mad days of the dot.com boom a particular favourite was ‘ecosystem’ – “your products exist as part of an ecosystem. By defining and decomposing the various business architectures contained within this ecosystem we can identify opportunities to monetarise…” Classic….
I like the blog – my first time here!
How about ………….. leverage?
Jeeezzzz – gets me everytime.
Mind you, it’s fun making them up. Reckon I could get any traction on ‘ecollaborative’- my new would be buzz phrase?
Like Peter, my first time here too – enjoying it a lot.
Nice one Matthew
This one is similar to the “visibility” example cited above. “The optics are off” means “it looks bad.”
I heard this when the CEO was reviewing balanced scorecard targets that he deemed too lax.
What about the overuse of “passion”? For Pete’s sake I just want people to get enthusiastic about an idea, I don’t need them to sleep with it!
Hi Jenny,
I couldn’t agree more. I hate “passion” with a passion. There are so many other good words for commitment, enthusiasm, dedication, joy, excitement etc. Yet businesses seem to think that passion is the only word they can use. Especially in the context of people or business plans. Yuck.
Matthew
Couldn’t resist this re Passion Victims
Also presented as a video, as ……..it’s easier than actually reading anything
David Mitchell takes a position too
vid http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/interactive/2009/apr/30/advertising
Love it.
Two more that just get my blood boiling are “task force” and “strategic plan/planning”. For the love of god, you’re not about to take down a major crime boss at his mansion! You’re just getting a bunch of people together to talk!
Oh, and how can we forget “master plan”? This one floors me every time I hear it. No one can tell you what a master plan is, it’s just a vague concept that whenever said, people just smile and nod in agreement as if it’s as understandable as the words “German Shepard”.
I know I am a few months late here, but a few that are on the hot plate at my place of work:
1) Questions or ideas not immediately relevant to a discussion are put into “the parking lot”.
2) Ideas that are too broad to meet specific needs are criticized for taking a “peanut butter approach”
3) Projects that need to be implemented quickly need the team to use the “hurry up offense”
4) and my all time cringer, rather than “being on the same page”, we need to “sing from the same hymn sheet”….
Yargh.
@William I couldn’t agree more. I get very cross when I hear people warn about ‘boiling the ocean’. Another cliche that should be obliterated.
love the blog. i would be a millionaire by now if i managed to kow-tow to business speak. i just cant do it. i recently had an American boss who would never say ´problems´, they were always challenges and he used to run the whole gamut of cliche abuse. I was once asked to ´pick the low hanging fruit´, by him, I laughed and said ´did you really just say that? subsequently I am now unemployed and cant get a decent reference from him. and also people who dont know how to pronounce the letter´H ´Haitch´instead of áitch´, I am English, scuse German keyboard.
Low-hanging fruit? What does that mean? The going-forward term is like a virus – eventually it will run out of hosts!
Across the globe. Has the planet gone flat?
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