Ah, business speak. My poor little bleeding ears hear it every day.
Why must we bastardize the English language? Each year, business schools crank out thousands of graduates with no discernible language skills and fancy new buzzword vocabularies, including the following gems:
- Benchmarking
- Aspirational
- Value Add
- 30,000-Foot View
- Share of Voice
- Dollarization
- Actionable
- Incentivize
- Mindshare
- Synergy
- Disintermediate
- Ideate
I had a manager who LOVED the word "onus." The onus is on you to find a solve for this. or Let's put the onus where it belongs. It's a little too close to the word anus for my taste.
If you're at a loss for buzzwords, there's a handy Buzzword Generator.
It's got to stop.
I'm putting the onus squarely on your shoulders. :)
Messing with our language is bad; plagiarizing philosophical ideas and passing them off as business-focused is even worse, to me. I had a friend who was in business school who loved to evangelize about his latest business self-help thoughts. The thing is, everything he had to say, attributed to the business writer du jour, had its origin with a seminal thinker. The business writers just repackaged sometimes ancient wisdom with hip lingo to feel the business school crowd! Same thing in Education classes, sadly, so teachers end up praising Educational Sociologists rather than Plato...
ReplyDelete