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.

I was probably typical of college English majors in that I imagined my life would be suffused with beautiful prose and urbane conversation. You know, that whole Dead Poets Society kind of vibe. Instead, I spend my days reading stuff like this:

Role-based access control empowers granular access to specific resources within an administrative domain.

I was going to say something sarcastic and pithy here at the end, but I find that words fail me. No doubt they’ve been sucked from my brain by the swirling black hole of aesthetic awfulness that is technical marketing language…