Backlash of the Buzzword Backlash

Maybe for humor’s sake, or maybe because it’s just easy game, several magazines and pundits lately have bashed business buzzwords. In a fit of wit, Fortune magazine issued its first Mallie award winners. Mallie…that’s short for “Most Annoying Lingo.”

Fortune put out a call to its readers for “little irritants” like “think outside the box” and “keep me in the loop.” Apparently the response was quite healthy, and the magazine ranked the votes of readers, listing the least to the most “frustrating phrases.”

Some that made the list are “bottom line,” “At the end of the day,” “touch base,” “win-win,” “core competencies,” “ping,” “radar screen” and you can imagine others.

Oh yeah, the winners? “New paradigm” and, says Fortune writer Anne Fisher, it’s evil twin “paradigm shift.” Also “bandwidth” was a winner, especially when it refers to people. In the Fortune article, Fisher quotes a reader named Lauren: "Do we have to call hiring people adding bandwidth?" She quotes another reader who says referring to humans as bandwidth is "appalling."

The final Mallie winner, says Fisher, “is richly deserved: Any phrase – uttered by any businessperson at all, at any time, for any reason – that contains the word ‘vision.’”

Strangulation or evolution?

If that’s not enough, you can find more buzzword backlash in Newsweek, which ran a story called “Attack of the Weasel Words.” The writer of this article was discussing the work of Australian speechwriter Don Watson, who wrote a book called Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words and management-Speak are strangling Public Language.

According to Newsweek, Watson particularly dislikes the words “implement” and “enhance.” And “input” is high on his list of despairing words. “It all has to do with input and outcomes,” he told Newsweek, as though such language of productivity is somehow anathema.

It sounds more to me like Watson is unhappy with the industrial world than he is with the words we use to describe it. To me the crux of the discussion is about change and communication efficiency. As the world evolves, so does language, so to despise the evolution of language is to despise progress.