This problem is exactly why I decided to create my Slack app Whatis! https://whatis.rocks/
Shouldn't it be "What are rocks?"
Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
11–20 of 115 posts
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#12This reminded me of the section about "Clutter" in the book "On writing well":
> Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes. When the Digital Equipment Corporation eliminated 3,000 jobs its statement didn’t mention layoffs; those were “involuntary methodologies.” When an Air Force missile crashed, it “impacted with the ground prematurely.”
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#13Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#14I’m curious when people swapped the word reply with revert. I keep seeing people use phrases like “I’ll revert” when what they mean is “I’ll look into that and get back to you”. Particularly working in software I always have to stop myself when the initial reaction is that they’ve just said they’ll undo what I’ve requested.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#15A startup I worked for was constantly seeking to have everyone aligned on things. The original concept of having people pointed in the same direction was admirable, but it quickly became something like a capital-A ‘Aligned’ (meaning good) with the inverse capital-U ‘Unaligned’ being about the worst thing you could be. God help the person who found the word ‘Unaligned’ on their semester review...
It sounds like a cult !
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#16I sometimes use business talk as a tool to make countering my points unattractive when having public discussions inside the company.
For example - let's say your boss decides to introduce some mandatory meeting that everyone agrees is useless. Rather then complaining about it in normal language, I would say things like "well, one of our core values is delighting clients, which I would be able to do much more efficiently if we would iterate on our process and try to optimize the time currently used by this meeting".
The example is intentionally simplified and the response is exaggerated, but you get the point - they are the ones encouraging you to use those phrases, which makes it more difficult for them to push back when you do it against them.
The only real risk is a coworker bursting into laughter in the middle of such an exchange.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#17All areas of practice have their own jargon, words that superficially sound similar to regular English but actually have specific insider meaning that promotes faster in-group communication (and a degree of in-group signalling) - this is true for scientists, software engineers, yoga instructors and yes, business people.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#18Corporate buzzwords are also how to say things that you can weasel out of later.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#19Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#20As we are at the word play, TIL "turgid", "shibboleth", "cloying", "hackneyed", "wheelhouse", "iconoclast".
To native English speakers I advice to try at least once in their career an employer with English as a business language but not headquartered in any Anglosphere country, where English is a second language to the most employees - the communication dynamics in such environments is quite different and the American corporate newspeak doesn't stick.