Gobbledygook. Anyone else had enough of meaningless gibberish in business documents?

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Permalink Reply by Erik Deckers on October 3, 2008 at 4:31pm

Ha! You hit my hot button issue. I wrote a blog post called Gobbledygook, Drivel and Tripe in 2007 that picked on business language. In fact, it's one of my annual themes, at the end of the year.

Of course, there's also the first column of the year -- It is What We Thought it Was -- where I write about Lake Superior State University's Banned Word List. I do that one every year too.

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Permalink Reply by Lalita Amos on October 3, 2008 at 4:35pm

Erik, if I hear "in the tank for" one more time, they'll find me on a clocktower with a high-powered rifle, dreadlocks in disarray, splitting my infinitives and violating the Thistlebottom Rule.

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Permalink Reply by Amy Stark on October 4, 2008 at 7:38pm

I blogged about your post, Erik. I don't know if you ever saw it. I was reading through your blog archive on Smaller Indiana and found the post you mentioned. It was hilarious.

I copied below the original blog I wrote about your piece, and if you want to see the whole conversation you can go to this link... a few other Smoosiers added to the conversation. Great post, Lalita!


-------------My original post------------------

I read something on Erik Deckers' Blog, Laughing Stalk regarding words that should be banished due to their OVERUSE. From Erik’s blog, I went to the original article published on LSSU’s website.

Before announcing the offensive 17 or so words, the last paragraph in the original article states,

“In this spirit, LSSU presents its 2008 list, a PERFECT STORM of overused and abused words and phrases that POPS ORGANICS, to a POST 9 /11 world DECIMATED by WEBINARS.”

In the above paragraph, the words in all caps were among the doomed 17. I’m just glad groovy wasn’t on the list =)

That got me thinking. The authors missed out on the following three sentences.

“Social Media participants” ARE THE NEW “Bloggers” and their SWEET and EMOTIONAL WORDSMITHING – well--- IT IS WHAT IT IS. Don’t throw them UNDER THE BUS just yet.

BACK IN THE DAY, before we knew about the BLACK FRIDAY—post-Thanksgiving SURGE, RANDOM articles AUTHORED by philosophers encouraged all to GIVE BACK .

I couldn’t fit the word WATERBOARDING in-- I just don’t like that word, anyhow.

I must admit, there are three I use: AUTHORED, SWEET—I love Napoleon Dynamite, and WORDSMITHING. Thanks for the post, Erik. That was fun.

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Permalink Reply by Erik Deckers on October 6, 2008 at 2:57pm

I remember this. I really appreciated it. Thank you for the warm reminder.

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Permalink Reply by Bruce LaDuke on October 3, 2008 at 6:04pm

Buzz words,jargon, and corporate speak are the nemesis of business. They fragment the business enterprise and cause people to lose sight of the overarching integral systems. The same is true of social enterprises. I think all of this is rooted in the way our educational institutions, especially graduate programs, are structured in that they seek and reward any unique research, whether it is relevant to an overall system or not. Students then graduate thinking that's the goal of business enterprise...not.

Everyone waits for the next big book to chase after and then they try to implement it in 10 directions. Then these same people get promoted up into organizations and turn productive operations into a bowl of soup. Over-emphasis on silo concepts and buzz words is rooted in our educational system and has totally derailed American business.

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Permalink Reply by Nila Nealy on October 3, 2008 at 8:11pm

One of my most prized books is Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide. This, um, sentence is on the cover:
Why many enterprise-oriented human capital assets consistently utilize complex linguistic architectures and niche-centric jargon to articulate mission-critical messaging and action items to their companies' diverse global constituencies, resulting in discernible disenfranchisement and change resistance on the part of each and every value-added stakeholder, who is consequently required at the end of the day to deploy more bandwidth toward drilling down into the communication than might otherwise have been required to maintain his or her comprehension of same and how not to do that.

Me: Guilty!

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Permalink Reply by Erik Deckers on October 3, 2008 at 8:43pm

Those are the guys who also created the Bullfighter software I use. I wrote about it back in june or July, I think.

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