Past its sell-by date

The nanny software has edited out t w a t. I wasn't being too rude.

There are, undoubtedly, bigger things to worry about but I don't think the scale of a problem need determine whether it is worthy of your concern. Of particular concern is viewing the degradation of language as 'the development of language'. This overly popular and rather trite phrase is now used (presumably not in your case Winky) as an excuse for poor language skills. "I'm like, y'know, omg!" as an entire sentence surely doesn't represent a development of anything. I do think some attention to the language is worthwhile and I do worry about the notion of regarding any change as a development. Those two words are not synonymous.

Looking at your current photo (avatar ?) I can understand your point of view.

I find that many of the business people that I have met and who use these modern expressions are lacking in useful vocational skills. They have no real idea what they are talking about and simply hope that others will be too meek to challenge them for fear of appearing ignorant.

In these cases I usually ask them to re-phrase their message/request/whatever in plain English or to enlighten me as to what they actually mean by "going forward" etc

Cheers

Don

+1, please let us go elsewhere for once...

Don, i believe we are singing from the same hymn sheet...

enjoy

ken

I have to say...

There used to be an amusing game you could play at meetings where you crossed off BS words & phrases from a list & when a certain total was reached you leapt up and shouted "full Iist!" (or something like that). It very quickly curtailed the use of BS from most folk but there were a few who just couldn't stop themselves. 

This from a man who gets in a mega-froth about athletes!

There are of course "bigger" things to worry about - Syria, radioactive leaks in Japan, governments attempting to silence journalists via terror laws, Egypt, whether West Ham will win away this coming weekend, etc -  but this thread isn't about those.

As someone who attempts to scrape a living out of writing, I think words are extremely important. Just read George Orwell. I hate it when they are misused, or abused. I also happen to think that the English language is one of the most beautiful, vital and rich manifestations of our humanity. Just read Shakespeare. Or Pope, or Shelley. Or Waugh, Hardy or (again) Orwell.

Management-speak is nothing more than an affront to the magnificence of our language. A word like "learnings" is squalid and hateful because it is meaningless, made up, clumsy and designed to disguise the user's inarticulacy, laziness or lack of thought; or to impress or keep people in their place.

I find this kind of degredation of the mother tongue utterly depressing and, to be frank, even worse than teen text-speak (LOL).

You may disagree and that's fine. You might not like it but I don't give a stuff. It's certainly more important than worrying about how much athletes get paid.

I'm with Kevin-W here (apart from the WHU bit, obviously). These phrases are often used by people who want to appear as sophisticated and knowledgeable whereas what they betray is laziness of thought or cowardice to say what they really feel. As Don says above, asking someone who uses these expressions to give specific examples to explain what they mean very often results in their lack of substance becoming immediately obvious. 

People who preface what they are about to say with "to be honest" are either:

• about to be dishonest
• going to state the transparently obvious
• footballers

Language does change, though, although I agree with Kevin on its importance. Look at the number of words the authors you list introduced into the language (or first recorded). Even the OED now has a second definition of 'literally' as being just for added emphasis, to reflect the fact that a huge amount of its usage is for that reason and not its original meaning. It might be lamentable, but that doesn't stop it being true. Not all that long ago (in the grand scheme of things) 'awful' was good and 'fantastic' was bad. Not just evolving meanings, but complete switches. 

'At the end of the day' is merely the current (and temporary, hopefully) way of saying 'when all's said and done' which - by virtue of being largely discontinued - now sounds rather poetic despite being precisely as meaningless.

Chaps

Time changes as does the language. Management speak is purely slang for a particular group of people.

Before I retired I used it all the time because when you say, for instance, "lets pick the low hanging fruit" or "its about time to eat the reality sandwich", people know precisely what you mean and it is applicable when you are trying to drive a process forward.

I tend not to use it now because it is no longer applicable to me. So it is horses for courses.

Regards

Mick

All football pundit speak

Some very good points about jargon - fine in its place but probably best to leave it there - and how language develops. I don't object to the latter - there wouldn't be much point. The battle for 'literally' and 'disinterested' is lost while 'jejune' is now so routinely used as a synonym for puerile that puerile is what it will come to mean. No harm in putting up a fight but sensible to acknowledge defeat when it's inevitable - language is after all about usage. But also worth the effort to avoid words/phrases in danger of becoming what Fowler called battered ornaments if using them undermines the impact of what you're saying (or makes people think you're a footballer). That was really the point of my post.

Not one I use, but "going forward" is the same as "in the future" or "from now on". The irritation it causes me is that it is usually redundant, rather than the term itself. As in "These are the plans we will use going forward", "These are the plans we will use in the future", or "These are the plans we will use "from now on" all mean the same thing. Issue is that "These are plans we will use." arguably says it all. Admiitedly, using a phrase like "going forward" or "in the future" does convey the sense that something has changed that the simpler statement does not. I guess the "We will use these new plans" is simpler still.

I don't think it is meaningless. I always understood "learnings" to be an almost-exact synonym for "lessons". No?

I'd agree that it is made up. All words are made up. Clumsy, not so sure - perhaps that is a matter of opinion but it does have one extra letter. Ther remainder of your assertions are less defensible, and certainly not true in general.

Yeah but every time I'm involved in "stakeholder engagement" (which is probably what I should have had in my previous post) I know my opinions are going to be solicited and ignored.

It's this Orwellian use of language that annoys me so. (Government just reduced my wages by 12% after - you've guessed it- stakeholder engagement.)

SJB

Not to me.

I think there are two separate and unrelated issues at "stake" here:

1) The use of language and jargon

2) A disconnect between your expectations and the behaviour of others

The second one affects us all. It isn't caused by the language that is used.

And people who say "I don't want to offend you, but......" are inevitably about to say something incredibly insulting and offensive.

When I was growing up, I grew up in a community within a society. I was friends of some, colleagues of others, acquaintances of more. I was a citizen in a Republic. I wasn't a stakeholder in anything, the word just wasn't used. It's an impersonal word. There is no equivalent word in Irish Gaelic. Nor to the best of my knowledge in French, German or Spanish.

You  have a point with 2) above but I think the use of word itself is integral to this disconnect.

Patients on trolleys in hospital corridors don't come to be called stakeholders in the heath service in a government minister's speech because they have just gone up the priority list.

SJB

I used to like "a plan for a plan"

also have heard "open the kimono"

when "the rubber meets the road"

In my game, this is a real and necessary thing. The projects we develop are so large and complex, a large multi-disciplinary team is required to just develop the project plan, let alone do the design and detailed engineering and establish the systems for actual procurement and construction. If we didn't "plan for a plan", there would be chaos. (There often is, anyway. But that's another story.)

Not my experience. I find most successful business people to be hard-working and intelligent. Most have "done the hard yards" "at the coalface". I find no correlation between the use of jargon and effectiveness. Some use it more than others do. It is overly simplistic to dismiss jargon users as people somehow seeking to deceive. 

'Let's run it (an idea) up the flag pole and see who salutes' 

'trainings, equipments and top notchers' are all common where I live. I saw a sign on a clinic door the other day 'circumcisions pesos 200 only' and on the door of a convenience store 'Circumcision Kit is sold here' - no one seemed to know if it was a DIY kit or whether I could start a business using the kit as I might get a lot of tips but none of the top notchers there understood the joke. 

I worked in advertising between 2005 and 2011. This is a trade where the use of obfuscatory jargon and business bombast is a pre-requisite for climbing the corporate ladder.

My own favourite, heard at the start of a brainstorming meeting, was "Let's stir-fry some ideas in the old think-wok".

This is why most of the sensible people who work in advertising spend all their time in the pub.

The master of all this of course was Gus Hedges in Drop The Dead Donkey, so masterfully written by Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkins. I'm sure they're all on Youtube somewhere, and his delivery of them is megathrust - ace!

• I'll be stir-frying some ideas round my think-wok 
• All right Team are we achieving megathrust? Ace!
• Are we sniffing round the bottoms of the opposition?
• Aye aye coach, had a good weekend recharging the batteries for another surge of powerhouse info-dynamics?
• Coach, if I could input into your mental mainframe for a moment...
• Could we interlock brain spaces in my work area?
• From now on I'm going to employ relaxation techniques to turn off stress river and mosey gently down contentment creek.
• Helen we need a rapid interface in the chin-wag department.
• Helen, if I could just park in your mental multi-storey a moment...
• Henry, television is no longer corner store it's a hyper-mega-market. And if we want Connie Consumer to slip her hand into the freezer cabinet and pull us out, we have to be the frozen peas with the nice picture on the front and the 10% off coupon.
• I feel a very real sense that we ought to be wary of running any unsubstantiated stories if we're to avoid a faeces and fan situation.
• I see myself as a sort of hands off overview executive who sits at the sharp end and interacts within the office matrix...
• I think we have a slight togetherness shortfall here.
• I'm in major cellular rejuvenation mode, fast tracking my way to eternal biological viability.
• I'm reading this great new book on the benefits of reciprocal social intergrational relationships within the work environment. ("He means 'having friends")
• I'm setting you free! Free to roam the high seas of enterprise as the buccaneers of our broadcasting future!
• It's an anti verminous defecation deterrent. ("It's to stop pigeons crapping on the building")
• I've never been at a burial scenario before.
• Jill, could you come for a brief scuba in my think tank?
• Just a thought I wanted to pop into your fishbowl to see if it blows bubbles.
• Let's operate a zipped-lip scenario on this one.
• Let's stress how Tony (Blair)'s got a superb raft of ideas, several rafts in fact, which he's lashed together into a pontoon of excellence!
• Look out Mummy, the snake wants a reproductive interface.
• Look, Henry, if it's any help, I do have a sleep area over capacity situation.
• Morning hotshots! Are we cooking with napalm? You bet!
• Morning talent base! Are the afterburners on full thrust? You bet!
• Morning, mountaineers. Climbing the north face of newsmaking again are we? Teriffic!
• My place is here, with my family of co-acheivers!
• Problems are just the pregnant mothers of solutions.
• Quality stress diserpation opportunities here.
• Sorry, Helen, had a bit of a composure shortfall earlier.
• The three of us can go back and get into some real pro active recreational interfacing...
• There is just something I'd like to pop into your peculator, see if it comes out brown.
• Today is tomorrow's tadpole of opportunity.
• We all need to go on a forgiveness curve.
• We do rather appear to have an ongoing underwear entanglement situation...
• We're merely running our bulletins through the cappuccino machine of innovation, see if it comes out frothy.
• We've got to downsize our sloppiness overload.
• Yes, well, I sense we may be straying down tangent boulevard here.
• Yes, well, obviously I don't have an opinion, I'm a support module, but it would be very easy to find ourselves standing on buttered ball bearings over this piece.
• Yes, well, publicity-wise this is a rather regrettable gonads in the guillotine situation.
• You see, when it comes to sexual interfacing with the female gender group, I've always been caution-orientated due to ongoing problems of an adaptive nature regarding the gooiness factor on the physical front.