I get annoyed by thoughtless and uncreative use of certain overused terms/statements in corporate settings. Below are some that are so annoying, they distract me from the conversation. What are some that annoy you?
- Peel back the layers of an onion
- Incentivize
- Let’s table that so we can circle back to it later
- We’ll out that on the backburner
- Let’s not reinvent the wheel
- They just started a new project, so their plate’s full and might not have the bandwidth for an additional something else.
- Grab the low-hanging fruit
- That’s a game changer
- The ball’s in their court. If you don’t hear from them soon, send them an email to touch base.
- I sent it up the food chain, so it’s out of my hands.
- Let’s give it 110%
- There are lots of moving parts
- We need to have an aha moment
- At the end of the day, what matters are the key takeaways
- Let’s engage in the best practices
- They’re working on it as we speak
- It’s a controversial approach, so we might get some flak for that.
- So-and-so is not a people person
Well, phrases such as:
- We must aim to reach return of investment
- Make sure to know your target demographic
- Customers want content
all reek of terminal capitalism
- We’ve got progress in each of these swim-lanes
- I just want to double-foot stomp what the vice president said
- The team has continued to Pac-Man away at the problem
- We’ll present this to show them the art of the possible
- Me and the other directors had a mind-meld on this topic
- We don’t have all the information; we’ll have to pull the thread on that after the meeting
- It’s a short timeline so we’re going to have to hit the ground running on all cylinders
- Our excellently crafted PowerPoint is sure to get them to hit the “I believe” button
- It’s going to be important to establish a sense of urgency
hit the ground running on all cylinders
🤢
I loathe each and every one of those, except “swim-lanes” which I can accept only because I hear it used when talking about actual flowchart swim-lanes (which is still a better term than “rows that represent different roles or actors within a given work process”).
“Circle back to” and “sense of urgency” set me on edge. I’m constantly shelving stuff to get back to it later and pretty much always concerned that I’m not “doing good enough” or quickly enough so I don’t need faceless suits throwing my symptoms like buzz words around so casually.
You may like the simple language stuff that is happening. There is a major effort to remove jargon, legalese and corporate nonsense from all customer facing documents.
It’s becoming an accessibility standard in my country. All government documents are expected to utilize this in the comming years.
The Hemingway Editor is becoming my friend in this fight. And Microsoft is starting to implement simple language suggestions in its products.
Hopfully it will soon hit RTE tools so that my long winded comments will also be simple.
Woah, I’m going to use that Hemingway Editor a lot. I can write wayyy too much sometimes. Thanks for sharing
I use it for technical manuals. I find it nails me a lot for passive writing. that part is painful to correct, but it makes a big difference.
At work my rules is to remove 50% of my words before anyone can see it. The later it gets, the worse my verbosity gets in text. This Hemingway editor does look interesting. I use simplewriter a lot, especially when I’m doing technical writing for mixed language audiences.
I’m curious of how much of the annoyance at these jargon terms is generational. I’ve seen a couple versions of this article (https://www.businessinsider.com/workplace-jargon-gen-z-and-millennials-left-out-work-2023-6) floating around the past couple of days, and people my age (I’m gen x) and older seem to be the main people relying on workplace jargon.
I used to hate all of the office jargon so freakin’ much, but eventually decided that it is an excellent tool for masking. I still avoid a lot of the phrases listed, but some have made it into my regular vocabulary because they easily identify complex yet frequently relevant concepts. I’m much less likely to wind up in spin if I can say “we should focus on such-and-such because it is low-hanging fruit”; otherwise I’ll tend to dive into a deep analysis of the relative benefits compared to the work effort involved of every relevant item, just to convince people that “such-and-such” is the best place for us to focus our limited resources.
otherwise I’ll tend to dive into a deep analysis of the relative benefits compared to the work effort involved of every relevant item
I bet the autistic people would appreciate and value you for that. Some NTs might get upset or feel threatened by your thorough analysis tho.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of my coworkers that I interact with at this point in my career seem to be very strongly NT. The other autists mostly seem to have migrated to roles where they can operate primarily independently and without interruption (I’m in IT, surprise surprise :) ).
The standard formula that starts every presentation in corporate websites:
“At X, we…”
