Office Jargon

b-but you have to have teams! How else can you criticize your staff for not being "team players"?

TIPS FOR MEETINGS

Do you keep dozing off in meetings and seminars? What about those
fruitless, boring conference calls? Here's a way to change all that:

(1) Before your next meeting, briefing, or conference call, prepare a
card.
- 25cm by 25cm is a good size. Divide the card into columns-five
across
and
five down. That will give you 25 blocks.

(2) Write one of the following words/phrases in each block:

synergy

strategic fit

core competencies

best practices

bottom line

revisit

take that off-line

24/7

out of the loop

benchmark

value-added

proactive

win-win

think outside the box

fast track

results-driven

empower (or empowerment)

knowledge base

at the end of the day

touch base

mindset

client focus(ed)

going forward

game plan

leverage

(3) Check off the appropriate block when you hear one of those words
or
phrases.

(4) When you get five blocks horizontally, vertically, or diagonally,
stand
up and shout "B*llocks!"

TESTIMONIALS FROM SATISFIED "B*LLOCKS BINGO" PLAYERS:

"I had been in the meeting for only five minutes when I won."
- Jack W., London

"My attention span at meetings has improved dramatically."
- David D., Manchester

"What a laugh! Meetings will never be the same for me after my first
win."
- Bill R., Edinburgh

"The atmosphere was tense in the last process meeting as 14 of us
waited
for the fifth box."
- Ben G., Reading

"The boss was stunned as eight of us screamed "B*llocks!" in unison,
for
the third time in two hours."
- Kathleen L., Ipswich

Wait until someone tells you that they'll revert to you later.

The thing about English is that it is very easy to change the part of speech of a word into another. This is a blessing and a curse.

I personally hate "utilize". People who utililize the word utilize should begin to utilize the word "use", which means the exact same thing as utilize except that it utilizes two less syllables.

Also "guesstimate." It wasn't even that clever the first time someone came up with it, yet now it looks like it might compltetely replace the word "estimate"

ARRRRRGGGGHHHHH!

pathbreaking
accessible
poststructuralist
hagiography
provocative
sodomy
historicism

Im work avoiding my deliverables.

can you join my lone-wolf sub's war on "attempt" in academic journalese viz "in this essay i attempt to show": say "in this essay i show"! if you DON'T show it, don't publish the bloody essay, or at least change to "in this essay i speculate timidly" etc etc

Most academic books are predominantly intended for libraries, course adoptions, etc. Often specialist books get dressed up as "trade books," but don't sell accordingly.

I can't remember if we used "trangressive" or not but I'm guessing yes: there were a good half-dozen words specifically for queer-theory books, including a special bonus for "multiplicity" and "desire" used in same sentence.

"in this essay i attempt to show exactly what the director mouths off abt endlessly in the promo material"

half of the entries in "the best 100 movies of all time" progs on channel 4 feature some nitwit pointing out the WORLD'S MOST OBVIOUS METAPHOR: as often as not the nitwit is actually the director or screewriter

"going forward"
"risk manage"
"value add"

"Sarbanes-Oxley"

Also: "actionable analytics" WTF?

"THe image is over-optimized."

Meaning, rather counterintuitively, that it looks like crap.

A major British government department brings you "ground-truth" (verb). As in "We need to ground-truth this proposition". I.e. find out whether it's true in practice.

The constant use of "in terms of" or "with respect to." As in, "We have problems in terms of human resources." Why not say, "We have problems with human resources"?

Yeah, or to be coy and cowardly you can leave it trailing: 'So, er, in terms of your leaving date...'

I dunno, what if your company had forced labor chained in the basement? That would be a problem in terms of human resources, but a non-problem in terms of labor costs. Obviously one needs to be clear about such things.

I mean, "we have a problem with slavery" just makes you look bad

Indeed - it's the use of the phrase when there are no such subtleties involved that is so bloody annoying. It implies the speaker can see subtleties there that you can't.

I hate jargon meant to replace perfectly good ACTUAL words. E.g.:

Most annoying client I have to deal with: the one who phones up to ask: "Have you actioned the changes I requested?" ACTION IS NOT A
VERB, DAMMIT.

BUT ENACT IS!

A major British government department brings you "ground-truth" (verb). As in "We need to ground-truth this proposition". I.e. find out whether it's true in practice.

How about "verify" or "test"?

My job really does not lend itself to jargon, but my favorite is "LP situation," which means "missing person" (usually a kid running around who we find within 5 minutes).

Currently in vogue:
kilt v. to make cosmetic changes to documents prepared by English lawyers, so that they conform to Scots law. (e.g. "Links asked us to kilt Project Biscuits" "I kilted a couple of docs and billed 10 grand haw haw haw").

Also used often:
cold towel adj. descriptive of a read-through of a large document, implying, well, I haven't a clue actually.

Hate hate hate:
ping v. to send, esp by email.

"blue-sky thinking" and "catch-up" can both fuck off

(even though "catch-up" really isn't that bad, its ubiquity drives me up the cocking wall)

work harder then

LOL

(jk)

Heads up = telling you

I got this in an email the other day and had to ask the guy what he meant

"fancy going downstairs for a coffee and a quick catch-up?"

no, you poncy winka, no i duzzn't.

something that's doing the rounds in our company

"sanity check"

HS

Everyone loves a Blue Sky Session!

Or a Big Ideas Shower!

we have a nice one here, in a different vein from the above, more specific to us - ghostbusters. the broken image link is a red circle with a cross through it like the one on the ghostbusters logo (and english traffic signs etc) so if no images are appearing then it's ghostbusters.

That's a lot better than having to put up with people who turn nouns like 'feedback' into verbs.

You mean Americans? *ducks*

No, it's definitely happening over here! Reading above, Americans hate this guff as much as anyone.

I don't work in an office, but we do have jargon.

KB's = knockbacks = items that we don't want from a collection being bought in
Snip it & flip it = close the shop (said at the end of the day, meaning to snip the lock and flip the sign)
Queue jumper = a small task with a specially high priority to be done suddenly in the midst of another longer job

quite like "queue jumper" actually, although i imagine it could evoke stabby urges if heard too often.

The latest one round here is "sense-check", which means "look at"

Yikes!

yeah i think sense check is the same meaning as our sanity check

"Users were having trouble grasping how the new application would fit in with their day to day working so we came up with the term 'fairy dust' to refer to little bits of information we can sprinkle the help packs with to help them understand this".

"Accountable talk"--that's all we hear at staff meetings these days. That, and "collaborative inquiry." (Or "enquiry." Not sure which.) It's been that way for the past year. I have only the vaguest sense of what they mean. I've been teaching grade school for 15 years, and students have always been talking, and I've always been talking back to them, back and forth we go, but now the talk is supposed to be accountable. People get paid more than I do to come up with this nonsense.

"Solutioning." OMG.

yeah that one hit me like a brick when i first heard it too (told on a call that "this meeting is not for solutioning" no less!)

Went to a meeting w/ upper mgmt and the union today.

"We will table this because x isn't here"
"This is a conversation that should be offline" x1,000,000

No "let's put that in the parking lot?"

at least you got some face time with them.

my favorite is 'sunsetting' a project or organization. sunsetting

i've heard some really interesting uses of "double-click" recently

^ do tell

also 'circle back'

sacking people = re-profiling now, apparently

double-click has become a shorthand for getting into more detail on a topic