April 21, 2006  

Corporate lingo watch

Ever since I first heard someone ask to “take this conversation offline” I’ve had a biochemical aversion to corporate parlance, especially when technical terms are used unironically to describe non-technical things. Today’s morsel went something like this:

“Thanks, Bob, I really like those ideas. One that I’d particularly like to double-click on was …”

Shouldn’t it be “click”? I mean, isn’t the implication here that this is an idea that should be followed, like one follows a link? Or is he double-clicking it to run it like an application? Start it up?

You know, if you’re going to lace discussions with technical metaphors that are already a minefield of business-specific terms you could at least strive not to sound like you’ve just discovered the mouse and GUI. Oooh, the pretty icons make my copy of WordPerfect come alive!

Two bitter posts in a row. Feels good.

2 Responses to “Corporate lingo watch”

  1. ian hughes says :

    it is interesting that the infospeak has undergone a seachange.
    Many of the ‘tech’ savvy dilbert style manglers have been using terms like ‘cycles’ and ‘scheduled downtime’. Whilst we all surge into web2.0 and 3.0 they are just starting to adopt the GUI for their point of reference.
    Expect in two years time ‘let me just rez this for you’ ‘we need to invert our y axis on this one’ ‘Lets have a verbal wiki’ ‘can we circle strafe this idea’ ‘consider this conversation a live podcast’ and ‘lets provision an intellectual server for this one’ etc

  2. Dempsey says :

    A search on corporate lingo brought me here. Feed added to reader. Here’s my corp-lingo nonsense I use on our Product Manager:
    We need to leverage our skillset in order to monetize our throughput.
    Yup, means nothing, cracks him up though.