the office

What?

Say

bot tom line, corporate lingo is inevitable. resistance is futile. if you try to think outside the box, youll probably just be seen as pushing the envelope, and at the end of the day, that isn t ex actly a win-win. here, then, is your mission statement: Achieve bAsic fluency without becoming a kool-aiddrinking, jargon-spewing drone
CECIL DONAHUE

in a futile attempt to pry some information out of our teenage

son, my wife recently asked him if he was planning to hook up with his buddies later on that evening. He winced. Do you even know what hook up means? he asked us. Obviously not the same thing it once did. Well, I told him, youre welcome to have hot gay sex with your pals over here, if youd like. Well be home! Nothing is trendier than slang. Every generation redefines the language to create its own lingo. Who wants to sound like their lameass older siblings, let alone their flabby, dorked-out parents? Same thing in business, where the easiest antidote to same-old-same-old monotony is simply applying a witty tweak to tired terminology.
 gq.com november 2007

Put a little lipstick on the pig and...presto! Slow-moving colleagues who make swift corridor passage impossible become meanderthals, the road-blocking receptionist becomes a deceptionist, and laying off old workers becomes decruiting. Fun, right? Linguists may bemoan how technology, mass culture, and an itinerant middle class have decimated our regional dialects, but go to any trade show in America and youll hear people speaking in some mighty weird tongues. Doctors, poets, football coaches, fishermen, bankers, real estate agents, cops,

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the office
it for you) is also an enemy of comprehensible English. Not rocket science. Engineers at NASA, of course, prefer the phrase not brain surgery. Win-win. Odds are that the person who drops this during a negotiation has the upper hand, so you may want to check the fine print. It is the contemporary version of Trust me. Agreeance. He who says this is also likely to insist on between you and I because, well, it sounds weird so it must be right. Monetize. This character never met a noun he couldnt figure out how to verbatize. Also favors such words as anonomize, evangelize, incentivize, operationalize, and productize. Will not listen when you criticize. Brain dump. This is the nauseating cousin of the creepy phrase pick your brain, and folks who use these tend to have peculiar eating habitssmelly microwaved lunchesfollowed by extended bathroom breaks. Irregardless. Cannot be convinced that this word does not existirregardless of how aggressively you evangelize your disagreeance with its usage. Jump the shark. The person using this phrase does so in the constant hope that someone will ask about its provenance so the user can display his impressive knowledge of pop culture, but all it shows is that hes ancient enough to consider the Fonz a cultural touchstone. Low-hanging fruit. This phrase is favored by the same crowd that peppers their statements with clichs drawn from sports, particularly basketball. Refer to previous entry on slam dunk for possible explanation. So if Orwells right about the corrupting effects of language, how do you protect yourself against contagious corporate clichs? A sense of humor helps. One of my colleagues and I play this game where we try to construct entire conversations consisting exclusively of the most cringe-inducing examples of corporate crap-talk we can remember. You coming to this blamestorm? hell ask me as he pokes his head into my office on the way to our three oclock meeting. I thought we already covered off on that. Lipnick wants to get on the horn and run out the playbook. Will we be doing any cross-functional team facilitation with multidisciplinary stakeholders? Some of the dialogue may involve a dial-in. Then Id better bring my handheld solution. We have, on occasion, carried the game over into actual meetings, but usually nobody seems to notice were joking, which is kind of depressing. The trick is to master the patois of your field so you can toss around terms of art like a complete pro and sprinkle in an occasional clich to keep yourself from looking like an alien or a snob. (Nobody likes a prig.) Otherwise, you want to keep the lingo to a minimum. That shits as addictive as crack and probably even harder on your brain. And never make the mistake of using workplace jargon with any of your civilian friendsin the unlikely event that you still have any. cecil donahue works at a major American media company.
november 2007 gq.com 

gq@50

The BesT T V c o m m e r c i a l of The lasT 50 years

by Dan Wieden, founder of the Wieden+Kennedy advertising firm

sales folk, publishing typestheyre all masters of jargon unique to their area of expertise. Its a secret code that enables pack members to identify one another: Dogs sniff each others butts, gangbangers flash hand signals, and accountants riff on SarbanesOxley, or Sarbox, as they like to say. Yet theres a big difference between professional nomenclature and business clichs, between terms of art that illustrate mastery and expedite communication, and plain old bullshit designed to camouflage laziness and stupidity. I am embarrassed to say that I occasionally attend meetings conducted in so buzzword-heavy a dialect that people might as well be speaking Swahili. A week or so ago, I actually heard someone describe his specialty as global IP filings and cross-functional team facilitation with multidisciplinary stakeholders. Wha? Those were his exact words. I would have asked him to repeat them, but another lackey had already started yammering in the same exotic lingo, so I slipped away and jotted them down. Later, as I puzzled over that sentence, its full meaning remained elusive, a bar of soap in a tub of water. Global IP filings sounds legit, something purposeful, an actual function a human being might be able to perform. But crossfunctional team facilitation with multidisciplinary stakeholders? What in the hell is that? Creating PowerPoint presentations
 gq.com november 2007

for people from different departments assigned to the same project? More often than not, buzzwords are used not to enlighten but to deceive, not to articulate ideas but to convey a shared sensibility. They represent the language of conformity, and is there anything more dangerous than mindless, lockstep conformity? The motivation behind a word like rightsizingto take this to its logical extremeisnt all that different from the propagandistic impulse behind Adolf Eichmanns final solution: putting a positive spin on a heinous activity. Of course, you dont have to go back sixty years or cross any oceans to find an example of jargon employed to disseminate misinformation: It was only a few years ago that CIA director George Tenet was peddling the invasion of Iraq by assuring there was absolutely no question that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The case was, as Tenet told the president, a slam dunk. That was an argument George Orwell might have appreciated; for it was the 1984 author who once observed, in the aftermath of World War II, that if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. If corporate Kool-Aid can indeed be toxic, then buzzwords are its concentrate, as the following abbreviated glossary illustrates. Think outside the box. This is the classic example of unintended corporate irony: invoking a wretched clich in a vain attempt to inspire creativity. The guy who utters this

crap has never actually set foot outside the box. He would not, in fact, know a triangle if it stabbed him in the eye. He is a box man, a master of the cube, and as a highly respected company square, he is skilled in the art of squeezing a few more pounds of shit into said box and declaring that hes created an expanded fecal quadrilateral. Assmosis. The guy who uses this phrase the process by which butt-kissers gain advantageis a dangerous subversive who has managed to retain an ounce of wit and probably hides the dark secret from coworkers that hes got a somewhat fulfilling life outside the office. A hobby perhaps, or a wife he actually likes. At the end of the day. Little-known fact: The Producers Guild of America requires all new members sign a commitment to use these six words to begin at least 48 percent of all sentences. Second only to the word ankled as the most frequently appearing phrase in Daily Variety. Slam dunk. This gem is usually employed by small white men with an average vertical leap of seven incheswhich (again with the little-known facts) also happens to be roughly twice the length of their fully erect penises. The only thing the guy who uses this phrase has likely ever dunked is a cruller. Bottom line. There are two types of users, and while both tend to be cut-to-the-chase kinds of characters who are laudable enemies of interminable meetings, the guy who uses it as a verb (Let me bottom-line

V W

B e e T l e

It was done by Doyle Dane Bernbach back in the 60s. And it was so simple it was revolutionary. It showed a VW Beetle sort of moving through these white-out conditions and snow-covered streets. The Beetle drives up to a snowplow parked in a garage, and the voice-over says, Have you ever wondered how the man who drives a snowplow drives to the snowplow? For the creative community, seeing that commercial was like, Oh, my God, you can do that? The climate of advertising at the time was very straightforward: product benefits, no sense of irony. With this we suddenly realized, Hey, were not just selling nuts and bolts to a nameless mass of people. Were talking to our friends and neighbors. And it made you wonder, If you werent advertising, how would you talk? Immediately, the Beetle became the 60s car of the moment. You just loved the pluckiness of it. That ad spoke to the generation, because the voice fit the times. And it was the first time I was really charmed by a spot. That commercial made you want to get a car. It made you aspire to be that intelligent and charming. You wanted to meet the people who made that commercial. You wanted to meet the people who drove that car.AS TOLD TO HILARY ELKINS

PHOTO CREDIT FOR MINOR CREDITS AND STYING

illustration by christoph niemAnn

PHOTO CREDIT FOR MINOR CREDITS AND STYING