Marketing Speak
I would like to officially register my undying hatred of the following inelegant buzzwords that I routinely see in the tech-sector marketing documents I proofread for my day job:
- Leverage (when used as a verb, e.g., "Leverage your existing infrastructure...")
- Utilize (why not simply say "use?")
- Operationalize (um, yeah, now they're just making stuff up)
- Best-in-class (everyone claims this title, but no official body that I know of bestows it and there's no consensus on who deserves it or what qualifies you for it, ergo, it means nothing)
- Best-of-breed (so servers and network appliances are breeding now? Aren't they worried about overpopulation?)
I don't know what's worse, having to read these crappy words and phrases or having to write them (I've done that, too, and it wasn't pretty). But I do know I could happily live out the rest of my days without ever encountering any of them again...
This has been another mid-day grumble, courtesy of Simple Tricks and Nonsense.
Comments
well, you get to write the crap, I get to read the crap and sort out all the IT "buzz" words and decide what is "good" and what is "crap".
As far as "best-of-breed", I don't think "they" are worried about overpopulation, "they" are worried about mutations from these offsprings...ever try to propagate active directory across multiple subnets in an heterogeneous environment? ick...talk about your mutations ;)
Posted by: mikeg | April 4, 2006 6:27 PM
I can imagine... sounds like a job for Milla Jovovich and her big chromium guns...
Posted by: jason | April 5, 2006 9:27 AM
For some reason administrative types like obfuscation because they think it makes them look smart. I run into that at work all the time... people writing things that are purposefully complex, when there's a much simpler, and much easier-to-understand way to write it.
I fear it's creeping its way into MY writing, since I've been using my business writing skills a LOT more than my fiction/poetry writing skills. The horror.
Posted by: Jen B | April 5, 2006 10:09 AM
In the case of what I'm working with, it's not administratives trying to look smart so much as engineers trying to figure out how to communicate with actual human beings. Or, alternatively, actual human beings -- well, humans who work in marketing, which are still slightly more human than servers and PCs -- trying to figure out how to sell things to engineers. Either way, the end result is the same.
I share your concern about my own writing. One of these days I'm going to get back to writing fiction, and when I do, I'm afraid all my characters will speak like IT guys and MBAs. Sigh.
Posted by: jason | April 5, 2006 10:11 AM