Avoid These Office Buzzwords

Yahoo ^ | October 4, 2010 | Marlys Harris

[ConservativeStatement]

Last year about this time, I posted a list (plus definitions and correct usage) of the office cliches least loved by a random sampling of executives polled by Accountemps. You may — like me — be too snobby and old-fashioned to want to sling the lingo, but you've got to know it or run the risk that your peers and superiors deem you hopelessly out of the loop. (Oops, there's a tired office phrase if there ever was one!) That's why I have made it my personal mission to keep you up to date.

[ConservativeStatement]

Taken from Yahoo's front page: "If your boss tells you to "take it offline" during a meeting, here's what she really means."

Why does the writer use "she" to describe a generic boss? What happens if the boss is a transgendered person confused about his or her identity in this everchaging mosaic that is America? What a sexist! /sarc

[End Times Sentinel]

I've noticed that

Fag(ott), AIDS Monkey, retard, and all but the most clever of racial epithets are pretty much frowned upon, at least at my office.

[Puppage]

I think I’ll circle back & take a 30 thousand foot overview of this story.

[DManA]

KPI (Key Punching Idiot)

[Tax-chick]

Two of my favorite bits of jargon come from a reader in the U.K. who says he made them up. The first: is "failure cascade", which he defines as a "sequence of bad stuff happening." An example might be: "The knowledge economy seems to be in a failure cascade." "Bus factor," he says, is a measure of how much the company would suffer if person X got hit by a bus. Example: "Billy has a really high bus factor." He reports that both phrases seem to be catching on.

This is my favorite part of the article.

[Red Badger]

[Huck]

As long as you do your due diligence.

[Red Badger]

I hate:

Think outside the box

Proactive in that/this area

[rarestia]

The propensity for women writers to use the feminine third person is becoming pretty standard. Every textbook I’ve read during graduate school has been written with “she,” while the male writers use neuter such as “they, them, their, etc.” However, the latter usages are still frowned upon as poor English in lieu of using “he and/or she.”

The academics (and journalists) are completely steeped in radical feminism, and “gender studies” in any discipline usually means investigating the impact of something on women. Men are always excluded.

[ConservativeWarrior]

Bus factor," he says, is a measure of how much the company would suffer if person X got hit by a bus.

It used to be "If person X got hit by a bus, or won the lottery, where would we be?"

The more office-friendly and efficient phrasology has become "What if person X gets hit by the lottery?"

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

At the end of the day, most of this co-depends upon the adjacencies of deliverables in the context of an end-to-end right-sized, yet scalable solution.

[Proud2BeRight]

Also: “getting grounded”, “architect” used a verb, and “paradigm”.

[Tax-chick]

"What if person X gets hit by the lottery?"

LOL! If a manager distributed lottery tickets to *some* of his employees, could that be considered a bad performance review?

[Ditter]

I am hopelessly “out of the loop” by choice.

[AlmaKing]

I hate:

Lather
Rinse
Repeat

Stooopidddd!

[dfwgator]

[Proud2BeRight]

And “push back”

[dfwgator]

Didn’t you get the memo?

[Tax-chick]

I agree - both of those are annoying, especially “outside the box,” coming from people who aren’t even competent inside the box!

[knittnmom]

Or from people you’d like to see permanently ejected from the box!