Vocabulary.com Blog
Articles about Business writing
Unless you're a resident of the Lego Movie's Bricksburg where "Everything is Awesome," you may have noticed that awesome is...well...not quite as awesome as it used to be. In fact, says Tim Askew, writing for Inc., awesome has become so overused, it's "inescapable, like verbal kudzu choking out the variegated richness of the English language."
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Anyone who works for a large organization (or maybe even a small one) knows that certain phrases grab people's imagination and spread through the organization. If you're like me, you go to meetings and presentations and expressions keep popping up, which is very distracting — you try to listen to what the speaker is saying, but you end up paying more attention to how they're saying it.
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In a comment on recent Blog post "Words We Love to Hate," Vocabulary.com user Sarah S. referenced the dreaded language of corporate speak: "Words like leverage, gamification, user interface, audience engagement, strategise...when I see the words 'align with' my aorta nearly pops!" And Sarah S. is not by any stretch of the imagination the first person to take issue with the language of corporate ladder climbing (or ladder clinging, as the case may be).
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Earlier this month, a post by Dan Frommer on Business Insider had this to say about Google, Facebook and Apple: "Recently, all three companies have been making a lot of 'acq-hires,' where they buy a company to acquire its human resources." You read that right: acq-hire. Where did this odd word come from?
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English is my native tongue, language is my beat, and corporate America is where I earn my daily crust. Nevertheless, every so often I encounter an English word — in a corporate memo, speech, or email — that mystifies me. I've seen the word before; I've just never seen it used that way. I've always assumed the word meant one thing; here it obviously means something very different.
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Wendalyn Nichols, editor of the Copyediting newsletter, offers useful tips to copy editors and anyone else who prizes clear and orderly writing. Here she takes aim at "corporate speak" at its most infuriating.
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Blog Excerpts
Business Buzzwords to Avoid
Impact. Ideate. Interface. Those are just 3 of 30 business buzzwords that you should remove from your vocabulary. See goodcopybadcopy for the whole list.
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