Weekend buzzwords

It's the weekend, and for those who speak in business buzzwords Monday through Friday, days off can be difficult. No boss or officemates around for you to dazzle with the latest neologism—usually one that's ugly and conveys little. To keep you from suffering the verbal equivalent of the bends, here are some words you can use for weekends. They'll keep those buzzword muscles in shape until you can get back to full-scale training on Monday.

Getting up=Offbedding
Brushing teeth=Posthalitosisizing
Blowing nose=Outsnotting
Eating=Preplumping
Exercising=Upmuscling
Bathing=Disgriming
Washing windows=Streakifying
Cutting grass=Downshearing
Trimming trees=Delimbinating
Running errands=Merchant lapping
Napping=Incouchification

Please share your own. We can build a whole new dictionary of meaningless phrases. Oh, wait, American business has done that already.

Two words to retire

Every now and then, words blast out of the lexicon and elbow their way into every article, blog, or tweet. Within weeks, their welcome is worn out because they're pushing other and perhaps more colorful words to the sidelines. With the speed of communication today, a word can become a cliche in about 48 hours.

My two candidates for the Boy-I'm-Really-Sick-of-These-Words Award are iconic and snarky. Chrysler and GM are iconic corporations that build iconic brands with iconic nameplates. I can live with that, I guess, but now I'm also reading every day about iconic TV shows. Iconic movies. Iconic foods. Iconic style. Even iconic sunglasses and lipstick shades. Not to be iconoclastic, but I bet we can stumble along with other words. Popular, perhaps, or well-known, or even beloved.

When someone recently referred to something I'd written as snarky, I thought it was relatively descriptive. But suddenly I have so much company in Snarkville that I'm thinking of moving out. Anything that's a little snide, a little sarcastic, a little cynical, is now snarky. I like having a choice. Will I be sardonic today? Or caustic? Sassy? Mocking? Maybe derisive or supercilious. But not snarky. Not anymore.

Let's all get out our thesauruses (I love that word; for me it always conjures up a really erudite dinosaur who wears thick glasses) and find some apt replacements for words that have lost their zing.

The Claritant Award II

Today, I've selected the Claritant Award-winners for national pizza chains. If you've not followed the Claritant Award, it's one I give out for clear, effective Web writing that is free of buzzwords and corporate gobbledygook. Last month, I looked at the insurance industry and gave the award to State Farm.

Insurance has a lot of issues with buzz, which is what made State Farm a standout, but the pizza folks seem to get it. In general, they write about their products with passion and a refreshing lack of corporatespeak. Many of the stories are similar: small-town, one-store starts and then national growth.

But even in this less formal industry, there were instances of Web sites that relied on "win-win," "proactive," and the ubiquitous "legendary service," a phrase that wore out its welcome in the late 1980s.

The winners of this month's Claritant Award are Uno Chicago Grill and Godfather's Pizza. The Uno site is easy to read and has a touch of sophistication I didn't find elsewhere. Godfather's employs a different style of writing--more reliant on its brand, but not too gimmicky about it. Very clear and understandable.

It can be hard to differentiate a business in which many others tout the same attributes--fresh ingredients, tasty crust, fast delivery, online ordering, and community service. These two companies pulled it off with style and simplicity.

I'm going to do it...finally

When I first started blogging, I said I was going to publicly recognize Web sites that place a premium on clarity. No buzz; no pretension; no coining of ugly, meaningless words. Just simple business stories told simply and precisely.

So today, I unveil the first winner of the Claritant Award.

The clearest Web site for the insurance industry is State Farm. Here's the company's mission statement:

"State Farm's mission is to help people manage the risks of everyday life, recover from the unexpected, and realize their dreams."

Beautiful. Not a buzzword to be found. No gobbledygook phrases. No bull. And the whole site is like that.

Thank you, State Farm. Whoever produced that writing deserves kudos and a raise. It sets you apart. Although many insurance companies do a nice job, including runner-up Liberty Mutual, some don't. I'm not going to tell you who they are. But you'll know them when you see them.

If you come across a Web site you think is especially clear and direct, let me know about it. It might win the Claritant. The business won't care, but it makes me feel better to recognize good writing in my own small way.

This is part of what's wrong with American business

Variabilize. It's a new buzzword I just found today in an insurance executive's speech. He defined it on his slide, but that's the point. He had to define it because no one in the audience would have had the slightest idea what he meant by that idiotic word. Does it mean varying a product line? Seeking new markets? Varying the company's pricing scheme? Or something else?

In this case of this speech, it had something to do with variable cost structures. But it could mean anything. Or nothing. I'm opting for the latter. I'm sure there was a clear, concise way for the executive to make his point, but he missed the opportunity, coined a hideous new piece of gobbledygook, and no doubt, confused his audience, at least momentarily. But because the word came from a top exec, it will whiz through the company, and everyone will use it--or make up something worse, such as variabilizability or variabilization.

Wake up, business folks. No one has time for these verbal shenanigans anymore. Get back to doing what you do and telling us about it in plain English. Please.

This is rich

I recently wrote an article for ezinearticles.com. It talks about specific buzzwords to avoid on your Web site. One of them is enterprise, when used as a substitute for business, company, corporation, or multinational conglomerate. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with enterprise. It's just sort of a look-at-me-I'm-a-fancy-word substitute for any number of sturdy, serviceable synonyms. It's overused and then some.

The second word I castigated is integrated. Most of the "solutions" out there are not only "effective," but they're also integrated. I hope so, because any so-called solution that doesn't work with what I already have isn't worth much to me. As I mentioned in my article, integrated should go without saying. In most cases, unfortunately, it doesn't.

Flanking the ezine article that gives 20 lashes to enterprise and integrate are several ads, and the title of one that directs the reader to a company called SAS is "Enterprise Integration." How appropriate. When I looked up SAS (pronounced "sass"), I learned that, "Since 1976, SAS has delivered proven solutions to access relevant, reliable, consistent information throughout your enterprise, giving you the ability to make the right decisions and achieve sustainable performance improvement." Wow! I've never seen a clearer example of a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Now, I'm not picking on SAS, because the rest of its Web site is relatively clear. By going deeper, I can find out about its products and services and even about the benefits it provides for its "family." But this positioning statement tells me nothing. I don't know what solutions it delivers. And delivers is a buzzword in its own right. No one makes or creates or supplies anymore. Everyone delivers. I don't know what kinds of decisions the company helps me make.

And sustainable? Oh, save me. It means long-lasting or easily maintained. It's also on my buzzword alert list because absolutely everything today is, or must be seen to be, sustainable.

As I look at this kind of senseless non-communication, I'm staggered by the amount of time and the number of words it takes to say nothing. My hope is that as American business begins to reconstitute itself in an improving economy (and it will improve), it will also realize that clear communication is the key to sales and an important aid to productivity.

Top Buzzwords and Why to Avoid Them, Part II

Let's move on to some more toxic buzzwords. Today's selection is drive.

My goodness, business drives a great deal today. In 15 minutes of Web browsing in only one industry, I learned that Allstate drives sustained shareholder value, Nationwide drives down the cost of healthcare, and Farmers drives innovation. In another quarter-hour of looking at advertising sites, I found that McCann Worldgroup drives demand, while Interpublic Group's diversity "ignites the creativity that drives results." And Wilen Group is driven by its innovative Founder (their capitalization, not mine).

It seems that drive has become a true buzzword, and as buzz waxes, meaning wanes. With just a little thought, we can come up with substitutions that work and aren't burdened by the self-consciousness of corporate gobbledygook. We can strive to build shareholder value, reduce the cost of healthcare, or foster innovation. We can increase demand, give clients the results they want, and be inspired by an innovative founder. Eliminating what I call flabspeak will bring about greater understanding. And isn't that the point of communicating?

Top Buzzwords and Why to Avoid Them, Part I

I'm not against jargon. If you're writing for a company magazine or speaking to a group of like-minded folks who know your industry, jargon is a useful tool. So this post isn't about that. This post, and several to follow, will deal with specific buzzwords--business words that are overused and rarely examined for meaning.

Those who have followed these posts know that my least favorite buzzword is solution, especially when, God help us, it's used as a verb, e.g., "We'll solution marketing's ideas this afternoon." What's the point of a solution if a problem hasn't been articulated? And if you look closely at Web sites, you'll see that solution is often simply a substitute for program, product, or service--all perfectly lovely words that tell the customer something about what the company does.

Right up there with solution is the word leverage. It's almost as overused and just as nonsensical. Leverage, in the context we hear it today, comes to us from the world of finance. Investorwords.com defines it as "the degree to which one is using borrowed money." It became a very popular term during the Go-Go '80s. Everyone was buying companies with OPM (other people's money), using the assets of one company to purchase another, and dancing in the streets. Greed was good. Well, look where that got us. But I digress.

Today, business literature and Web sites leverage everything, e.g., "We leverage our core competencies, business synergies, and human capital to bring you best-of-breed service." I'll bet if you asked the perpetrator of that sentence what he or she meant by leverage, you'd be greeted by a great big silence.

As far as I can tease out from the Web sites where this word appears on page after page, companies are trying to tell you that they have a lot of different kinds of skills and they'll take full advantage of them to give you great service. Leverage has nothing to do it. It's just a buzzword that's run amok.

As I said in Talking Your Way to the Top: Business English That Works, buzzwords are not just meaningless; they can be dangerous. I believe most people use them because they think it makes them sound like the big guys. They become too lazy to dig out a thesaurus and look for an apt synonym for the phrase du jour.

But in the worst case, buzzwords can be employed to shade the truth, to make the picture look rosier than it is. By saying nothing and using a lot of words to do it, companies can sometimes hide the facts. Today, that's shortsighted. Customers are looking for the greatest possible clarity before they plunk down their hard-earned dough. They're fed up with lack of meaning. Show them you care by giving them what they want: direct, simple communication. It will pay off.

Another spineless euphemism

In my book Talking Your Way to the Top, I feature several pages of euphemisms I consider linguistically dishonest, such as calling a body bag a transfer tube or referring to dead civilians as collateral damage. I just read a new one this morning in The New York Times. It's yet one more way to refer to firing people. "We're going to rebalance our organization." So go ahead and add "rebalance" to all the other words we now use to mean getting rid of employees: adjust the workforce, dehire, deselect, reduce in force, reduce the census, downsize, outplace, rightsize, terminate, shorten the path to profitability--and don't forget involuntary employee attrition and negative employee retention.

Each of them means you're out of a job, and each one is a crock of unadulterated buzzspeak cooked up to evade the truth and avoid the responsibility. Where is George Carlin when we need him?

Hooray for our British cousins

Last Friday, the Local Government Association in Great Britain told British civil servants to banish the buzzwords. One hundred words, including stakeholders, synergies, coterminosity, revenue stream, and empowerment, should be excised, the Association says.

Well, hallelujah! May I suggest that American business take a leaf from this book and immediately banish leverage, paradigm shift, planful, impactful, point in time, presenteeism, repurpose, radar screen, off-peopling, low-hanging fruit, messaging, mission critical, granularity, human capital, enterprise, drive and driver, bandwidth, actionable (except in its legal sense), at the end of the day, skill set, seamless, value proposition, value add, and many more. If we can stop wasting our time thinking up meaningless, self-conscious "business" phrases, perhaps we can back to doing actual business.

Drop these. Their time has passed.

Have you noticed some expressions that are creeping toward serious overuse? Once they seep into the water we hear them constantly, and they begin to lose their power and punch. Look out for:

• "A perfect storm." What this appears to mean is that all conditions are lined up to create an inevitable result. You'll hear the expression now related to politics (Clinton-Obama), economics (the housing downturn), the stock market, the energy market. The list grows every day. Keep an ear cocked for this one, and think twice before using it. People are getting tired of it.
• "It is what it is. " Well, of course it is. How could it be anything else? But when you use this one in business, you don't sound professional. You sound like an aging hippie or a mystic--and you aren't communicating anything of value.

It's not always hot

It's time to gang up on an overused word: hot. Cars are hot. Women, too. Men as well. Clothes. Shoes. On and on. The first billion times advertisers used the word, it might be been fun, amusing, sexy, trendy--or perhaps even hot. But now hot has become tepid, lukewarm, and irritating. If you're over 21, it's a word you might want to think about retiring--or at least mothballing until it comes around again in another 25 years.

Cool lasts forever. Hot doesn't.

New buzz

It seems the most recent buzz word is on the ground. I think this usage began with troops who were on the ground in specific war zones, and that makes some sense. But now everyone's on the ground, from rescue workers to school teachers.

I also predict a rise in the use of nascent. There are many things in this world that are nascent, to be sure, but the word hasn't been used much. I think it's coming on, though, and probably will enter overuse status within a few months.

I've also seen a peculiar blip in a redundancy: share in common. I seem to be hearing and reading it often lately, and it grates. We either have something in common or we share an interest in something, but we don't need to share it in common.

I find the rise and fall of words very interesting and would love it if you'd share (but not in common) the buzzwords you see looming on the horizon.

Can You Read This?

I'm still at it--trying to find corporate Web sites that speak English instead of flabspeak, that curious combination of buzzwords and euphemisms that confuses readers who might want to to know what it is the company actually does. Such sites are hard to find, and in my journeys I ran across one that I believe demonstrates exactly what a site shouldn't do. I won't tell you the name of the company, but here are a few gems from their attempt to communicate.

The company employs a client-proximity method, which I believe means they have a lot of offices in various countries, which makes it easy for them to be in touch with their clients.

It has a client-facing approach, which seems to mean that the company puts its clients' interests first. This word must be the replacement for client-centric, but it's not an improvement.

Ah, now we've hit the mother lode. The company is going to carry out some acquisitions that will ensure accretiveness to net profits. Now, let's see. Accretive means to grow by accretion, but if even Google can't find a definition for accretiveness, I have to believe it's a made-up boardroom word someone thought was as impressive as all get out. What it appears to mean is that the acquisitions will add small amounts to the bottom line, which I assume will make it healthier, but that's anybody's guess. This word is nothing but a waste of air, and plowing through all this verbiage is just too much work.

Another definition for accretion is an accumulation of dust and gas into larger bodies, such as planets. An accumulation of dust and gas? In this case, you bet.

Buzz costs time and money

I've been reading the annual reports of public companies these days, and I'm thinking of creating an award for corporate communicators who can write an entire business document that doesn't contain the word leverage (as a verb) or solution (where no problem has been identified)--or the truly awful solution as a verb: "We'll solution that issue after lunch."



If American business isn't competing as well as it once was, one of the reasons may be that American business can't communicate as well as it once did. Oh, we're wired, all right, and we're in constant contact, but that means only that words are flowing. It doesn't mean we're communicating. We're so busy working the latest buzzwords into our conversation, we've forgotten that words are supposed to move ideas from one brain to another, not waste our brain power as we try to decipher what our colleague just said.



My new favorite is landed on, which appears to mean something we decided or agreed to: "This is the design we landed on."



Yes, I know language changes; ginormous has just been added to the lexicon, after all, but too often business buzzwords are nothing more than attempts to create an in-group--a linguistic cool kids' table. But if we're to compete successfully, we need to leave adolescence behind and work together. Dropping the buzzwords would be a good first step.