Day 12: Play buzzword bingo “I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliché.” – Beck Key point: buzzwords and business clichés are the opposite of effective writing I heard a great joke the other day: “If you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, eventually one of them would write Hey Hey We’re the Monkees!” It came back to me this morning as I was thinking about buzzwords. I mean, how do people come up with the jargon that gets stuffed into business writing? Here is a list of some of the worst offenders (hat tip: BBC):
Going forward Bandwidth Cascading Granularity Drill down Anything 2.0 Stakeholders 110% Touch base Offline Incentivise Pre-plan Action (as a verb) From the get go Visibility (on some issue) Deliverables Low-hanging fruit Holistic End-to-end In this space Bandwidth (as applied to anything outside telecoms or computers) Traction Proactive Outreach Solutions Ecosystem (as applied to anything outside biology)
I don’t know where it comes from but Buzzword Hell is good place to send it. It’s the Room 101 for words you hate. You can nominate words you don’t like (today it’s “paradigm shift” and “blogosphere”) and people can vote for them. Buzzword bingo is a favourite game and there’s even a website that generates new playing cards on a random basis. There are also a couple of buzzword dictionaries. The first is BuzzWhack. There are some nice ones here. Finally, there is the fabulous and still-poignant The Devil’s Dictionary. Bullfighter is a free add-on for Microsoft Word that will scan your prose for clichés.
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