SubscribeJargon Watch
The other day Mary Cullen at Business Writing Info called our attention to linguistic inflation in business communication. Her example: exaggerating 
commitment beyond 100%. She’s right. We should raise the alarm.
As Mary says, “100% effort means full capacity, and is commendable. Exaggerating commitment to 110%, 200%, 500% makes no sense, and is meaningless jargon that should be avoided in business writing.”
I’m with you on this, Mary. I once had a boss who was a serial offender. In meetings with clients he’d proclaim, “We’re dedicated to your success a thousand percent.” I’d try my best (100%) not to groan and roll my eyes.
Now that we’re fired up on the subject of egregious business jargon, what are some other examples? For starters, here are a few, with suggestions for correction.
- Out of pocket – unavailable
- Bandwidth – capacity
- Human capital – people
- Leverage (as a verb) – to take advantage of
- Dialogue – talk
- Impact (as a verb) – to have an effect on
Let’s strike a blow for the language and push back against (I mean resist) offensive and confusing jargon.
What are your pet peeves? Let me know and I’ll compile a collection in a future post.
Have to agree with all of those – in fact, I have written about both “leverage” and “impact” on my own blog. (And with “impact” I’d go further – I don’t think you should use it even as a noun unless you’re talking about ballistics. I suspect the people who use it do so because they’re too lazy to learn the difference between the verb “affect” and the noun “effect”.)
I’ve never heard the phrase “out of pocket” to mean “unavailable”. Here in the UK, if you say someone is “out of pocket” you’re suggesting they’re broke, possibly due to being ripped off.
Can I add to the list:
“Visibility”, which I recently learned is doing the rounds. As in “did he have visibility on that?”, meaning “did he have an opportunity to see that?” or “did he get the email?”. I gather it’s usually used by corporate blame-surfers when someone has not done something that was expected of them.
What else? Nasty, pluralised non-nouns such as “deliverables”, “key learnings”, “outcomes” and “actionables”?
And of course no list of business jargon would be complete without the dreaded “solutions” (which I also recently blogged on).
I’m hearing these two buzzwords frequently now:
1) “Shovel-ready” – meaning planning is done and people could get to work right away, if funding or approval were granted.
2) “Skin in the game” – Warren Buffett talked about “putting skin in the game” in reference to managers and high officials showing their confidence in the company by putting their own money (their own skin ) in. Now, it’s a cliche to overstate involvement.
I don’t see what the problem is, but maybe if I think outside the box there will be a paradigm shift and I can begin to push the envelope.
There’s a lot of jargon in finance, and it makes a difficult field even more abstruse. During the peak of the credit crisis, everybody kept talking about the “lack of liquidity.” It was very confusing at times because that is a word that has at least two or three distinct but related meanings — 1) cash on a balance sheet, 2) buyers (with ready cash) in a market, and 3) funds “injected” (more jargon) by the Federal Reserve.
Jargon will always be with us because it’s useful; it enables experts to speak to each other efficiently without having to explain the basics over and over. But it’s also a way for people to show they are “in the know,” even if they’re not.
everyone uses the word, “about” in place of a verb or predicate..for example, “I am all about confidence.”That is about as poor an English sentence as I can imagine!What you mean is “confidence means a lot to me or I am confident.”
“About” is a preposition and as such cannot be used as eveyone is doing for the past few years.Example, “Let’s talk about shopping.” It can also mean ‘around’, such as “He went out and about.”