Attack of the Corporate Weasel Words

theodp writes "Does it bother you that churches have a Mission Statement touting their Core Values? That even the CIA has a Vision? In his book Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words and Management-Speak are Strangling Public Language and in this Newsweek interview, Australian author Don Watson argues it's time to protest the mind-numbing business jargon that infests our schools, churches and political speech. Examples that people have sent to him can be found on Watson's website."

Comments

Re:Critiques of the English language...

[ravind]

I know you're a troll but it's not so much a critique of the English language, as it is of the modern culture of Bullshit. It reminds me of another book "Abuse of Language Abuse of Power" by Josef Pieper, and that was originally written in German.

From Amazon's book description: "... reflects on the way language has been abused so that, instead of being a means of communicating the truth and entering more deeply into it, and of the acquisition of wisdom, it is being used to control people and manipulate them to achieve practical ends. Reality becomes intelligible through words. Man speaks so that through naming things, what is real may become intelligible. This mediating character of language, however, is being increasingly corrupted. Tyranny, propaganda, mass-media destroy and distort words. They offer us apparent realities whose fictive character threatens to become opaque."

Re:You'll never get rid of it.

[Foobar of Borg]

One of the best counters to this kind of nonsensical speech is the Socratic method of inquiry. Basically, you keep asking questions about what specifically they mean by a certain phrase, and then what they mean by the BS phrase they use to explain the first BS phrase, and so on. This gets rid of a lot of the nonsense speech assuming, of course, that the person speaking such nonsense is doing so out of habit. If the person you are addressing is BS'ing everything because it is to his advantage, then this will go on until the end of time (or at least until one of you gets tired). My step-father actually tried this once with a blowhard and just gave up at a certain point, because the blowhard appeared to have infinite energy for showing that he was "obviously correct".

Re:Outsource This!

[CmdrGravy]

If you had read the article properly you would have noticed that all the examples you are quoting are examples he has received from contributors, the opinions on the phrases are also the contributors opinions.

I agree with you that some of those points are uneccesarily nitpicking and anal but I have to say that Detention Centre is certainly a good description of a prison but sort of implies that it's somewhere you can drop in and out of at will when you wish to be detained.

Problem is not mission statements

[Fished]

The problem is not churches with mission statements, it's churches with mission statements that read like press releases. As a pastor, I've worked hard to get my church to adopt a mission statement so that I could then compare anything they want to do with the mission statement and eliminate a lot of the cruft. (Thus far, I haven't been able to get it through ... but the day is young. :)

The problem, usually, is that everyone wants to keep these things generic, bland, and inoffensive. They shouldn't be. For an example of a good mission statement, consider this one I wrote for a computer store I'm a partner in:

Mission: We will serve our customers with (1) top-quality service, (2) good advice and (3) fair business practices.

No weasel words, no paradigms--shifting or otherwise--and no nonsense. What we mean by these terms is spelled out in our values statement (which I won't reproduce here.) Because I have this statement, I can hold my employees accountable to it.

A mission or vision that nobody understands is worthless. But a good one is priceless.

Hey man that's my comic strip!

[PCM2]

Hey all right! Someone beat me to posting it. I am... so touched!

Anyway, yeah, it is a little ancient, but judging from the response I still get to it, it's definitely still relevant.

This strip was once printed in the Industry Standard magazine and in PC World New Zealand, of all places. Not to mention that Xerox once used it as a print sample for some of their color printers. But it's mostly known for having "escaped the lab" and been e-mailed to people all over the world.

And, fear not! I know for a fact that it's pasted on all kinds of cubicles all over the planet. In fact, my boss claims that one of the reasons I was hired at my current job is because of that comic strip.

(In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm the guy what drew it.)

Anyway ... yeah, over the years I have gotten literally thousands of e-mails about it, from addresses all over the place, including countless big-name corporations whom I won't name to protect the guilty. You know who really loves it, though? The government. I've gotten more e-mails from the military, government agencies, and big government contractors like Boeing than I can even count. My all-time favorite is still the guy from NIMA (which I believe is now called the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency ... think spy satellites).

Even stranger, though, are the e-mails I get from people in countries where English isn't even the native language. Get your head around that one ... they learned English as a second language and they're already familiar with this kind of speech. Now that's just ... sad.