[Ads-l] Garbage language, corporate-speak, bloated business jargon

[Mark Mandel]

I recommend this article. The paragraph after the author's name and
publication data is apparently the publisher's comment on it, exemplifying
and parodying the phenomenon. Below the horizontal line I've quoted the
first two paragraphs of the article itself.

Mark Mandel

https://www.vulture.com/2020/02/spread-of-corporate-speak.html

*This article was featured in **One Great Story*
<http://nymag.com/tags/one-great-story/>*, *New York*’s reading
recommendation newsletter. **Sign up here* <http://nymag.com/onegreatstory>*
to get it nightly.*
Garbage Language: Why Do Corporations Speak the Way They Do?
<https://longreads.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1854296747731744c923a33ef&id=470a89d23c&e=072b44f370>

*Molly Young | New York magazine | February 20, 2020 | 16 minutes (4,188
words)*

Let’s drop a pin in this and take it off-line so we can futureproof the
intiative with these key learnings and co-create innovative win-wins that
require an omni-channel push but no critical ask. Actually, let’s not.

*__________________________________*

*I worked at various start-ups *for eight years beginning in 2010, when I
was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while. A year
later, I returned to office life, this time at a different start-up. During
my gap year, I had missed and yearned for a bunch of things, like health
care and free knockoff Post-its and luxurious people-watching
opportunities. (In 2016, I saw a co-worker pour herself a bowl of
cornflakes, add milk, and microwave it for 90 seconds. I’ll think about
this until the day I die.) One thing I did not miss about office life was
the language. The language warped and mutated at a dizzying rate, so it was
no surprise that a new term of art had emerged during the year I spent
between jobs. The term was *parallel path,* and I first heard it in this
sentence: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can
you parallel-path two versions?”

Translated, this means: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco
installation. Can you make two versions?” In other words, to
“parallel-path” is to do two things at once. That’s all. I thought there
was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s
assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a
time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job
is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why
invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its
fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate
neologism.

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