Another, better-written take on this: https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.htm...
Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
91–100 of 115 posts
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As per my last email Isn't this just the "As I've written in my last letter" for the e-mail era? Maybe it's just a cultural difference. (In my native language - and probably because of that in English too - I try use the verbs corresponding to the medium, so if I wrote to someone then I'll refer to that communication as "as you probably read" instead of "heard", and so on.)
> Isn't this just the "As I've written in my last letter" for the e-mail era? It might as well be. It just always struck me as wrong usage, for lack of better term. "Per", to me, is always in the sense of "for each": per month, per head, etc. That said, I decided to look it up. And quoting from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/as%20per : > Is It Grammatically Correct to Say _as per_? > ...The more ponderous…
I thought it comes from some tortured Latin (see "per se", and per also meaning "by means of"). And the "as" shouldn't even be there.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As per my last email Isn't this just the "As I've written in my last letter" for the e-mail era? Maybe it's just a cultural difference. (In my native language - and probably because of that in English too - I try use the verbs corresponding to the medium, so if I wrote to someone then I'll refer to that communication as "as you probably read" instead of "heard", and so on.)
>As per my last email As a native English speaker, if I encounter this phrase I take it to suggest I am not paying attention.
Exactly. You can always replace "As per my last email," with "As you should have read and noted in my last email..." but the first one comes off a lot less passive-aggressive.
It's a polite nicety - a gentle reminder. I agree it sounds a little formal so I usually try to use "As I noted earlier," or "If you'll remember," instead.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#94I love Matt Levine's take on this: > From my time in investment banking I can easily believe that most investment banking transactions occur because investment bankers are pretending to do what investment bankers do, acting out scenes from “Liar’s Poker” until they start to seem real. I don’t know why investment banking would be different from any other industry. So sure, yeah, work is a kind of pretense.
What did bankers do before Liars Poker? If Liars poker didn't reflect reality, why did he write it?
Liars Poker reflected a sudden and gross change in the industry due to hyper-success. They went from boring mortgage firms to the richest organizations in human history within a decade, and it distorted thinking and emotional responses, as lottery winnings are wont to.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#95I’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.
As others have also pointed out, I also encountered this one with Indians.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#96All 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.
> that promotes faster in-group communication I think the reason that business jargon gets more flak than usual jargon is because it does not really facilitate faster communication. At least not to everyone involved. Maybe salesman to salesman, business dev to business dev, it would make sense. But then they use that jargon with everyone else (i.e., when it is not appropriate to) and it sounds just as ridiculous as w…
At least part of it is to keep civil.
There are memes floating around that joke that common businesspeak phrases like this are just polite ways to phrase insults, and that's only a little bit of an exaggeration. In my experience, when someone says "as per my last email", it is a very thinly-veiled version of "are you too stupid to understand what I just told you?".
But you have to keep civil in a business environment because a) money is on the line and b) you're going to have to keep interacting with the same people for a long time.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#97I 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 efficien…
Oh "values". This meaningless buzzword has creeped into every facet of modern life. From politicians and their "western values" to CEOs and their "values" to baseball teams and their "values", everyone uses "values" to justify their evil or to defend or excuse their evil. And of course there is the "alignment" of "values". Oh, stealing signs doesn't align with your team's values. We benefited from it greatly for year…
I guess you're more of a fields person.
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#98I 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 efficien…
Sounds like a Graeberian Bullshit Job then
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-...
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#99This kind of language usage isn't limited to fitting in socially in the business world.
People use overly-elaborate language to appear intelligent or innovative, too. I once spent some time learning a martial art whose founder had replaced all of the standard names for movement and techniques with novel, quasi-technical-sounding ones.
"Multiple attackers" became "plural assailants", "breathing technique" became "respiratory enhancement". "Sparring" became "fisticuffs". Etc.
It was maddening, because he would correct students who slipped up and failed to use his terminology.
https://www.usadojo.com/ross-performance-enhancement-system/
Re: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults
#100There are people that love this stuff. Mind boggling to me how people can write pages and listen to hours on end. Some jobs require you to make speeches and write pages and pages of this lawsuit unfriendly botton line oriented language. Insane.