Jargon and buzzwords drive me mad and I’m not taking it anymore!

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Gary Chow | 1 Comment » | Trackback URL

I can’t stand jargon, buzzwords, clichés, corporatespeak and other forms of gobbledygook. It drives me spare. Every time I hear one – especially a newly invented one – I feel like doing what the Peter Finch character did in the film, Network. Like him I want to thrash open the window and shout out loud: ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’

You know what I’m referring to. Words and phrases like:

• ‘Going forward’
• ‘Who can speak to this?’
• ‘Synergy’
• ‘Core values’
• ‘Key success factors’
• ‘Thought leader’.

The list is endless and everyday new buzzwords and vogue terms are added, and spread rapidly over the Internet. The latest buzzword ‘du jour’ appears to be ‘space’ as in ‘our company operates in the XYZ space’ or ’we’re seeking someone experienced in the space’. I read a corporate capability document not long ago that informed its poor readers the company was ‘at the intersection of two expanding spaces’. My God!

Read any annual report, prospectus, media release, job ad, corporate mission statement, advertisement, newspaper article, webpage and you’ll see numerous examples of this type of sludge.

The other day I read that a high flyer resigned his post as the head of a big company because he wanted to ‘re-engage’ with his family. Is that what his wife asked of him, a tad more engagement? Perhaps Hallmark should put out a series of ‘re-engagement’ greeting cards. Could be winner.

But it’s not just in the corporate world that we hear this rubbish. It’s everywhere. It long ago crept into the sporting world. Who would have predicted that? Sporting clubs don’t just play footie or cricket or whatever; nowadays they put out a ‘product’ and build a ‘brand’ and have a ‘mission’. Their players are considered ‘assets’ (some ‘core’, others ‘non-core’) and when these assets misbehave, they are deemed to have rejected ‘core values’ and may then face an ‘involuntary career move’ (or perhaps to re-engage with their families). Core assets are often put into ‘leadership groups’ and sent forth to ‘engage’ with ‘stakeholders’ in order to further the club’s ‘visions and values’.

At the start of each season, players don’t just slog up sand hills and lift weights, they sit down and establish ‘goals’ and ‘success factors’, and listen in as the gaffer outlines the team’s ‘core strategies’. When the season finally draws to a close, assets again sit down and are judged on their ‘key performance indicators’. How scary is that? Nothing strikes greater fear into a 110-kilo prop than to be faced with a set of damning KPIs.

The other day I heard our esteemed cricket captain, Ricky Ponting, say that his team’s good performance this summer ‘has stood us in good stead going forward’. To my battered ears, ‘going forward’ would have to be the most egregious example of a buzzword that has become ingrained to the point people use it without even thinking. You can hear ‘going forward’ mentioned at least three times when the smart young man/woman representing a bank gives the financial summary on the evening news everyday. Bankers love it. ‘Going forward’ would vie with ‘at the end of the day’ as the granddaddy of all buzzwords. Yesterday in the papers, a footballer described his mum thus: ‘at the end of the day, she means the world to me’.

Why do we do it? Do we use gobbledygook because we think it makes us sound smarter? Do we feel it’s necessary in order to make us sound more ‘managerial’? Is it considered a prerequisite for moving up the slippery corporate ladder? Why do we feel the need to invent terms? For instance, why does the prime minister say, ‘programmatic specificity’ when it’s a term that no one understands?

In his book, Death Sentence, The Decay of Public Language, Don Watson refers to public language used today as ‘debased, depleted sludge… that makes no sense to outsiders, and confounds even those who use it’. I can’t agree more and would recommend this book and his follow up, Weasel Words, to anyone with a respect for language and especially those in the corporate world.

My advice is this: stop talking in gobbledegook! It doesn’t make anyone sound smarter; it just makes you sound like a robot or a parrot. But if you must use it, at least confine it to your spoken words and never use it in your published or even internal documents.

To deliver a message the best approach is to write in plain English. Write with your target audience in mind and use words and expressions that are straightforward and commonplace.

I long for a day when I can open a corporate publication and not see the nonsense that is typical these days. At the end of the day and going forward I, along with many others, simply seek clarity.