Buzzwords: Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down

[jimbob]

As drkitten has said, lot of these do have useful meanings.

Business model being one. Two words to say something that would take quite a lot otherwise.

"We want to understand whether we can compete in this market when using our particular business model".

"Step Change" seems to have been popularised by politicians recently.

I often think of politicans (of most* hues in the UK at least) suffering from "business envy" and thus trying cargo-cult management, and trying to impliment misunderstood business ideas (or simply talk about the buzwords) in an inappropriate context.

*ETA: Probably not Socialist Workers Party

 

[Humanoid]

Lately I've been doing a lot of web development. While I have nothing against the true usefulness of things like Search Engine Marketing, AJAX, Web 2.0 (more a paradigm than a "thing"), Search Engine Optimisation, etc etc etc (buzzwords are not hard to come by in this industry), I have to say I hate how customers are routinely ripped off by unscrupulous businesses offering say "SEO", charging a monthly subscription fee for "SEO", then adding like, 2 META tags to someones website which takes them all of what, say, a minute?

SEO can be very useful if done properly, but I hate the term, as much as I hate the "3 click policy".

The problem is, clients who don't really understand the technology but have read enough marketing BS actually EXPECT me to BS them. Many seem disappointed in that I refuse to BS people, and often the only time I see their faces light up is when I do drop a magic keyword, like say "ecommerce solution", because they think they understand what this means. I know it's bad for business but by telling people how it really is, that SEO isn't a magic bullet for top google results for instance, some take it well but others will opt for the guy in the shiny suit who gave his big SEO and SEM spiel, and his integrated ecommerce solution (his definition of integrated meaning you can log onto it through the web).

Sigh... Such is life.

 

[jimbob]

Bump:

Just caught up with the IET magazine for May

Great article about the language of business

Discusses Virgin's "winning" entry for the Golden Bull award by the planin English Campaign about a Virgin Trains for a letter about problems booking online

Moving forwards, we at Virgin Trains are looking to take ownership of the flow in question to apply our pricing structure, thus resulting in this journey search appearing in the new category-matrix format … I hope this makes the situation clear.

It mainly discusses why business jargon is used:
Some choice quotes to give a flavour of the article...

Keeping it brief[/i]
To "diarise" is quciker than to put something in a diary...
To "outlook" because I am also quick and not limited to slow paper and pencil and want to show how forward-looking and proactive I am...

I want to show how dynamic I am so I will verbize enery noun that I can.( maybe I should verbizeify?) and make it seem as if I am the alpha-male warrior/general (especially if I only have X chromosomes)...

The next heading is
Lack of substance

“For HR to succeed it must re-equip itself through its own competence, capabilities, governance, delivery systems to enable managers to build the organisation capability needed to succeed.”

The striking thing about this is its air of desperation. If headless chickens could talk, this is what they’d sound like. Here we have language deployed by someone who has no idea what they’re trying to say, other than that it has to sound positive; accordingly, they’ve simply piled together a list of words that are unattached to their meaning, repetitive, wrongly punctuated and ungrammatical – all common features of the jargon-heavy statement. Grammar and punctuation, after all, have a specific function: they make plain the sense. But jargon is the enemy of sense, used in place of argument, not to bolster it. Applying grammar or punctuation here would be like erecting scaffolding around mist.

Ongoing positivisation

...And business language’s need for a positive outlook shows in its relentlessly upbeat nature. Being ‘good’ is no longer good enough: degrees of excellence now spiral all the way up to ‘paradigm-shifting’, just as all services become ‘solutions’, to underline a constant sense of achievement, of problems overcome. At the same time, bad things have to be downplayed, via widespread use of euphemism. Nobody needs reminding of the wealth of terms that have replaced the word ‘sacked’. With all information being filtered in this fashion, it’s no surprise that when businesses fail, it often seems to outsiders to have happened overnight. That’s because warning signs have effectively been censored; smothered under a blanket of positive noises.

 

[jsfisher]

I want to show how dynamic I am so I will verbize enery noun that I can.( maybe I should verbizeify?)

One doesn't verbize nor verbizeify anything. One verbs: "I want to show how dynamic I am so I will verb every noun I can." See how much cleaner that is, meaning-wise?

 

[jimbob]

True, I was obviously thinking about the current POTUS and several of his predecessors.

Sir Humphrey Appleby managed to say nothing with far more elegance...

Sir Humphrey: Unfortunately, although the answer was indeed clear, simple, and straightforward, there is some difficulty in justifying assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to the statement, inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information you communicated, and the facts insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated is such as to cause epistemological problems, of sufficient magnitude as to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear.

 

[maxfrost]

Back in the 80s, when "interface" was the key corporate buzzward, I worked for a Very Large Bank and ran across a job description in the weekly Career Opportunities: "Candidate will interfere with bank's clients and upper management." I applied, but didn't get the job because I obviously did not have the experience of getting into people's way as other, more qualified, candidates had.

 

[Wirelight]

Xtreme.

Everything nowadays must be extreme. My internet connection is the "extreme" package. Earlier today I bought some gum and it was "extreme ice". And yesterday my cousin was telling me about his "extreme" bike race.


Bleh

 

[jimbob]

Maxfrost and Wirelight, both fine examples of, what the article called, "Ongoing positivisation"...