34-52-2013: Options – Sh*t people say!

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As much as I hate to admit it, like everyone else out there, I can find myself using acronyms and some of those really annoying words and phrases that become “faddish” and overused. Every industry has its own set of euphemisms, words, acronyms, and irritating phrases.

When I started my current position I struggled with the new language and was baffled by the non-stop acronym use in emails, documents, and conversations. There is even an entire webpage devoted to acronyms in use in my Department, and even that doesn’t begin to cover those I have encountered. And to add further confusion, some of the acronyms I have used in former career paths are in use here, but mean totally different things.

Two years and a bit ago I didn’t know much of what this little girl was saying, sadly, when I revisited it, I understand almost everything, and every acronym is now in my vocabulary. That’s tragic, but funny. I fought it for awhile, made people spell things out for me to point out the ludicrousness of the language, but eventually I adapted, though I still freely point out the silliness. The video is made by a GoC employee – that’s short for Government of Canada 😉

“Could you interface with that team on its ad campaign that’s gone viral, and then circle back with me? If we can leverage similar assets, we’ll have a game changer.”

Buzzwords don’t improve communication, they cloud it.

When terms become overused, people stop paying attention to them. Good communicators use clear and straightforward language to directly illustrate their points. Every generation, every decade even, has its own set of phrases. Some of these really should get the boot they are so overused.

It is what it is – Bertuzi immortalized this one and it’s been used to death. It sounds lazy and uncaring. It was what it was and we should leave it behind.

Awesome – I’m guilty here, and it’s been pointed out to me. I know it’s overused everywhere, which makes it, less than awesome.

Whatever – That one just makes me want to scream. It’s dismissive and rude and just won’t go away. When I hear it, I hear “I don’t care what you think or what your basis for argument is, even if it is founded on reason, because I only believe my own simple minded thoughts and refuse to consider any alternatives.”

Think outside the box – This is so overused that it drives me nuts. It’s old, the box is so empty because no one has looked inside it for so long, maybe it contains some good ideas that we’ve all forgotten we put in there for safe keeping!

Process – Everyone is involved in a process, or is processing information, or is in the process of a life change/revitalization/reorganization/or something else. Processes have a lifespan, don’t they? Maybe this one should come to an end.

Virtual – Students take classes in the virtual classroom, our boating class does virtual anchoring, we discuss things in virtual conference rooms. Our lives are so damned virtual that we need to make an effort for reality and face-to-face again.

Let me be honest with you – Because you were lying to me all the rest of the time?

Let’s agree to disagree – Nope, apparently we just disagree.

Pre-owned – Oh c’mon! It’s “Used”! Call it what it is!

YOLO – Yes, I only live once, but I don’t need to reduce words to letters in an attempt to gain time.

Passionate – I know, I know, you love what you do, or you think you need to find something to feel strongly about, but this word is so overused that it’s been reduced to being meaningless by self-help “therapists” and marketers. Everyone’s passionate about everything they’re try to sell or the line of work they’re trying to get into. Passion is a word with depth and it’s so over-employed in today’s language that it has lost a great deal of its fundamental emotion.

Authentic – This one really irritates me. If you are authentically what other people think you should be, or authentically what you think other people want you to be, you are not really being authentic. Everyone is influenced by their peers, their family, their environment, their history, their likes and dislikes. So really, authenticity is a blend of everything you have ever experienced, taken with a dash of sugar, after you have shaken out the bits and pieces you don’t want anyone to know about. Yeah, that’s authentic. OK, if it makes you feel better to think so, you can go with that and I’ll just nod and smile. Whatever (see above!)

Empower – Talk about a condescending verb. It suggests that ‘You can do more if someone helps you, but that someone else is still in charge because they are “empowering you”’. It also suggests that you had no power without someone else’s involvement. You do! You don’t need someone else to tell you that you are capable, if that’s the case, then you aren’t being empowered anyway, you are giving away what power you have to another and allowing them to dole it out to you instead.

Comfort zone – Another silly phrase from silly magazines that people read, or from silly people who charge for silly advice, so that those who should just go for a walk and clear their heads can try to find an easy way to look for answers they don’t really need.

Transformation – “Transformational moments”, “transform yourself”, “leadership transformation” “I can help you transform your goals”. Screech! Can you say pompous? If you need to reinvent yourself maybe there is something else going on that you need to look into. You are who you are, love it. If you “transform yourself” then you are pretending to be something you aren’t, because who you are, or who you can be, is already there inside you. Maybe you are letting yourself out, maybe you had an epiphany, but you aren’t “transforming” into some new life-form.

Minimalistic – The word is ‘minimalist’. Don’t put -ic on the end of what’s already an adjective. Why would you do that? Why? That’s a bit stupidalistic. And why do you need to make an already long word longer? It doesn’t make you sound smart, and do you know why? Because it’s wrong.

Simplistic -This is actually a perfectly good word. The problem lies in its misuse. It does not mean a pleasingly focussed feature set. ’Simplistic’ is a pejorative term meaning ‘excessively simplified’, and is therefore derogatory. You’re using the term perfectly wrongly, do you see? Well, do you?

Functionality – I don’t actually encounter this one, but Kirk hates it so it’s in here for him. What does this even mean? It’s used in sentences like ‘For a new product, this has admirable functionality. . . , where it appears to indicate that it’s not total crap. If you’re reading something and you’ve used “functionality” in a sentence, try cutting out the sentence it appears in, and see if it’s lost anything of value. I’ll bet you that it hasn’t.

Vulnerability – Vulnerability used to be a meaningful word to me. It comes from the Latin word vulnerare, which means to be wounded. I used to equate it with danger, illness, physical weakness, endangered populations of plants and animals. Now it’s been commandeered by a needy generation to convey how they feel about expressing their emotions, wants, desires. The word has been exhausted by overuse, particularly by the self-help/let-me-help-you-for-a-fee professions.

Optics – Another annoying buzzword that seems to imply that something needs to be glossed over to make others think better of it. If that’s the case, then maybe there really is an issue that should just be addressed. (see Transparency)

Resonate – Resonance is a word I equate with music and physics. When did it become another one of those mainstream buzzwords that sounds like crystal-gazing-psychic-babble? Another technical term that’s become perverted for the use of wanna-feel-gooders. If you are using this word as a component of your everyday language, you’ve been brainwashed by some

Impactful – See ‘resonate’ above. Impact is the action of one object coming forcibly into contact with another. I like this article about the words’ overuse, particularly this bit ” The most popular definition on Urban Dictionary reads as follows: ‘A nonexistent word coined by corporate advertising, marketing, and business drones to make their work sound far more useful, exciting, and beneficial to humanity than it really is.’”

Take It To The Next Level – In theory this means to make something better. In practice, it means nothing, mainly because nobody knows what the next level actually looks like and thus whether or not they’ve reached it.

Transparency – Similar to “authenticity”, there is a serious overuse of the words “transparency” and “transparent”. “It’s transparently apparent that people have completely lost all sense of of what the word means.”

Leveraging – This is perhaps one of the most overused words in business. I love this excerpt from Fluent:

Leverage is the advantage gained by the use of a lever. Imagine a big rock. You ram a crowbar underneath it, push down on the bar and the rock begins to rise. You now have leverage.

The word comes by adding the suffix -age to the verb lever. When you lever (verb) the rock, you get this:

lever + -age = leverage

We are used to this in language:

spill + -age = spillage

dote + -age = dotage

advance + -age = advantage

The suffix –age transforms these verbs into nouns. That’s what it is used for. You advance (verb) your army, to give yourself an advantage (noun).

So if you want to use further the advantage that you have gained, how do you do it? Let me tell you how you don’t do it. You don’t advantage your troops. That’s nonsensical. Because a verb transformed into a noun by adding –age can’t suddenly be a verb as well.

It sounds completely wrong.

And yet bloggers, especially those who would like to be Seth Godin, are doing this all the time.

They say that the way to capitalise on your position – is by leveraging it. In other words, to leverage (verb) your leverage (noun).

It is a crude bastardisation of language. It takes a verb, to lever, that has become a noun, leverage, and twists the word into another verb even though it ends with the noun-defining ending –age. The suffix –age is the linguistic equivalent of streaking across the live final of The X Factor wearing nothing but a banner proclaiming ‘I AM A NOUN’. You can’t get more noun-like than a word made into a noun by the suffix –age.

You can’t spillage me across the floor or dotage me into delirium for suggesting that language does not work this way.

Because if leverage was a verb then we could create leveragage by doing it. And that’s just getting silly.

Other words/phrases that I now find to be overused and irritating include: mission, paradigm, challenges, goal-oriented, action item (I friggin’ HATE that one and it comes up in every single meeting I go to!), synergy, going-forward, in-the-loop (another hated one I deal with daily), and I could go on and on, but I already have gone too long. The point I am trying to make is that I just don’t understand why people want to try to make themselves “sound” pompous through the use and overuse of such words.

I have a good sized vocabulary, but rather than fling big words around, it is more meaningful to put things into simple, plain, clear English. Such an effort makes us more approachable, more engaging, more human. It’s easy to pepper writing with fancy words that make the writer sound more intelligent, but often it just makes me think the writer is trying to hide reality by clouding the facts, and in the end I can’t help but think the message is lost in a vacuum of jargon.

This bit by the late, and incredibly satirical but oh-so-accurate, George Carlin, clearly shows how the English language has been flowered and tidied up to reduce offence and render once clear ideas into sanitized

But here is the funny thing. A couple of months ago I was battling bureaucracy while trying to pull off approval for a fish health course I was asked to teach. It can be hard to convince people to give up a week of their time to take a course in something that seems like it might be boring and dry. I like to keep things light and interesting, and I function on the belief that keeping a class engaged leads to retention and greater learning. When I put my course outline together with section titles like “Viruses – The Hot Zone” instead of “Introduction to viral pathogens“, it was sent back to me by the Regional Director as being “Fluffy” and I was advised to make it high level, dry, and stuffy sounding, if I wanted approval. So I had to generate a secondary agenda/syllabus to get the approval, one that no one outside would see because, trust me, no one would want to sit through five days of that shit as it was written!

And then I went back to my “real” course material once I gained the approval, and filled the course with interested, and interesting, people.

Seriously.

Just because there are so many different options for saying things in a fancy manner, it doesn’t always mean that you should.

One of the websites I direct my students to is The Plain English Campaign.

Keep it simple.

Keep it real.

But if you want to generate your own babble, here is a fun series of links to play with:

Corporate B.S. GeneratorEducational Jargon GeneratorPhilanthropy Jargon GeneratorThe Jargon Generator