More Blather & Jargon, Inc.

Who among us has not furrowed a brow and wrinkled a nose upon being served an indigestible bolus of corpspeak such as "Structuring working partnerships that team with client resources, operations, and infrastructures" or "Developing and managing complex information technology lifecycles"?

LInguist Geoffrey K. Pullum of Language Log describes his despair at reading those phrases and others amid the web prose of Denver-based Gerbig Management. Pullum writes:

Yes, one wants to say, but what do you do when you get to the office? It all makes me realize that the Language Log corporation just doesn't have enough sloganware, mission-statementry, or marketspeak to belong to the modern business world. We just sit around writing stuff about language . . . We should be structuring linguistic resources to team with client communicational information infrastructures, assessing root neuropharmopsychosociolinguistic concerns for targeted linguistic lifecycle technologies, managing linguistic risk quotients to assist partners in navigating increasingly complex morpholexicosyntactic environments... That sort of thing. I think I just made my head hurt.

Take a couple of aspirin, Geoff, and read on. Lois Beckwith, a former corporate-communications drone who, therefore, knows whereof she speaks, is here to help you with The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit: An A to Z Lexicon of Empty, Enraging, and Just Plain Stupid Office Talk. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, Beckwith tackles such perennial offenders as "bandwidth" and "actionable" and opens the kimono on a phrase I find particularly annoying:

at the end of the day

1. not the literal end of the day, as in sunset, 5:30 p.m., 7:00 p.m., etc. The end result, The final analysis, When all is said and done, When the pedal hits the metal, When the shit hits the fan, When I'm reviewing my mutual fund balances and realize my kid is going to a state school . . . A phrase uttered in conclusion by managers who are supposedly explaining a somewhat nonsensical corporate tenet/idea/policy/decision that probably does not make sense. ("At the end of the day, it is what it is.") A nice way to end a thought, thrown in to infuse a statement with an air of authority, common sense, and definitive finality. A common leitmotif; it just sounds good.

Net-net, it's a win-win. Or not-not.

Comments

[Slating Review]

Remembers me of Bullshit Bingo where every participant gets a grid with common random business words (Proactively, Outsourcing, Low-Hanging Fruit, etc.). Check off each block when you hear these words during a meeting, seminar, or phone call. When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, stand up and shout BULLSHIT!!

[Steve S]

I was going to write a witty comment about the horrors of CorpSpeak, but I was too busy leveraging finite resources in order to create a canonical, actionable list of appropriately vetted heuristics to...