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

[Wilson Gray]

> Let’s drop a pin in it...

You mean, "Let's _put_ a pin it."

On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 8:22 PM Mark Mandel <markamandel at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org