I think the worst thing about management-speak is its ugliness. Why bring more ugliness into the world? Why not say what you've got to say artfully? That's the problem: people don't know how to make ordinary things beautiful, or artful, or at least pleasing. We need a new superhero: Aesthetics Man!

Heh. Now that would be quite a character for City of Heroes.

Oh man, I used to write that crap for a living a year ago. I am so thankful to be OUT.

Interestingly, the Marketese lexicon is very easy to pick up. The problem is that it infests your brain and makes it difficult to go back to writing simple and straightforward text.

If you haven't already seen Huh Corp, you really should. It pretty much sums up my view of the corporate world!

Sometimes parody can't compete with the real thing. Yikes.

Laura, what type of work did you do?

stop14, holy moses that site is frightening.

I think Watson is absolutely right.

Of course you can decipher the words and make meaning from them, but the purpose of using those words is to obscure meaning. It is because people are afraid of being too clearly understood and therefore challenged. By obscuring meaning the listener/reader takes much longer to understand the meaning if they bother at all. By the time they have understood, the moment for challenge has probably passed.

I certainly agree that jargon is sometimes used to obscure meaning! But I honestly do think that the opposite is true: People use jargon because they think it'll convey their meaning more precisely. Indeed, they seek to convey two things: i) The basic content of their message (i.e. "I judge kids based on their overall performance"), and, more importantly (for them), ii) the sense that "I'm a serious professional because I use this highly specific management-ese."

I actually think when people use jargon purely to dissemble and/or say nothing, it's bad, but rather less alarming.

What's truly terrifying is the number of people who use management jargon because it says precisely what they want to say.

I was the project manager and copy editor for a small marketing and business consulting company in Southern California. I graduated from college with a B.S. in Psychology (with an emphasis on the B.S.), and really didn't know anything about this business when I was thrown into it. I have an "ear" for writing like people can play the piano - I can pick up a style and tone pretty easily if you give me a couple examples.

So, I wrote things for our own company website like: "we provide a complete set of key marketing services that integrate with our clients’ strategic goals and tactical objectives...

The job quickly devolved into a joke (albeit a sad and painful joke). Once I discovered the Bullfighter anti-jargon software, it soon became my goal to get the highest Bull Composite Index score on my work. Then I knew it would pass by my boss with flying colors.

Heh.

I'm so glad to be out!

Ah, the Bullfighter app! I remember when that came out. It'd be fun to download it, dump the full text of a politician's speeches into it, and find out precisely what bullshit ranking they get!

Clive, that you find that sentence not to be mysterious is a clear indication that you have drunk more than your share of the corporate kool-aid. I think a little detox is in order. All seriousness aside, it is my contention that the origen of corporate speak is the need by some (typically management) to appear superior to others in the workplace and what better way than to write in such a fashion as to present a false impression of erudition while making your audience unsure of your meaning, thereby creating a sense of inferiority in those who have to read your drek.

Yuneek -- yes, that's the precise critique of a lot of the literary-theory jargon of the 80s, too: Many people felt its byzantine complexity existed solely for the purpose of making literary theorists feel smart and scientifically rigorous in their discussions of literature.

BTW, I should clarify: I certainly didn't find that sentence easy to read. My point was merely that it was not meaningless -- and that critics who dismiss today's jargon as "just nonsense" or "saying nothing" are, under the guise of critiquing it, actually not dealing with its truly malignant effects.

I work in a gov't communications shop and I'm ashamed to admit I'm responsible for some of that writing myself. How's this for the second sentence of an actual news release:

"A proposed new Multilateral Instrument and amendment to streamline existing mutual reliance processes are targeted for implementation in late August 2005."

Yeah, no reporters picked that one up. In my defence, the copy was vetted by so many policy wonks I didn't even recognize the end product.

My co-workers and I frequently joke about "multilateral instruments" when referring to jargon.

"... the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment."

George Orwell, "Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak", 1984

I love to use words,
Larger than a mountain range,
Clearer than blue skies.

I was wondering when someone was finally going to post a haiku somewhere on this blog.