If your head pops up above the level of your cube walls when you do that, it is called “prairie dogging”.
Previous posters have caught most of my peeves, but here are two I particularly dislike that I haven’t seen on this list:
bandwidth - as in, “I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with that right now.” (see “cycles”)
circle - “Let’s circle on that before next week’s meeting.” The marketing folks love that one. I always picture a bunch of covered wagons…
I had an annoying manager with an quip for everything. His favorite was “The 5 P’s” which stated “Prior Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.” Gak.
“Paradigm” really bugs me too. I once lectured a manager on postmodernism and called it “The Paradigm Paradigm.” I said that getting stuck in one paradigm was an obsolete paradigm, we needed new paradigms that allowed us to switch paradigms as required. He left me alone for a long time after that…
Just in case no one’s seen this site yet:
http://www.buzzwhack.com/
Oh my… just when I thought I was getting away from the BizJargon. I’m not going to dignify it as ‘bizspeak’ becasue the purpose of speaking is to convey ideas, not to obscure them </rant>
I’ll second the idea that the ‘touch base’ construction is the most annoying and contagious BizJargon around. And it shows up in the most unexpected places: last week I caught my funky and extremely cool Wiccan high-priestess friend using it! :eek:
BTW, I’m a little hazy on the rules of baseball, but isn’t ‘touching base’ considered a bad thing in baseball?
SteverinoAlaReno, may I use your ‘I am not a resource; I am a human being!’ as a sig? The company of one of my best briends was just <shudder> ‘rightsized’; he was ‘dehired’ and is now going to ‘take advantage’ of the services of an ‘outplacement coordinator’ </shudder> [sub](Head Office shut down the Canadian operation; my friend was fired dammit, and they grudgingly arranged for the services of a third-party job-search agency)[/sub], so somehow it only seems appropriate.
When the revolution comes (however you might define ‘revolution’, and that’s a Great Debate I won’t get into here), the people who promoted this kind of deliberately-obscuring soul-destroying dehumanizing BizJargon will be among the first against the wall, I’m sure…
I too hate task (used as a verb) and ping. Worse, in my office “task” has ceased to be a noun: the noun form is now tasking! (As in, “I’m working on several taskings right now.”)
Other hated phrases:
Out of pocket, meaning “not available.” As in “Charlie will be out of pocket next week.”
Platform, meaning “computer.”
Disconnect, meaning a misunderstanding or failure to communicate.
And one that’s peculiar to my boss: two things that are alike are described as “exactly similar.” :rolleyes:
Just reading that was painful! OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW !
I work for Australia Post, and like to make use of their disproportionate love of acronyms by occasionally inventing new ones, and just casually slipping them into conversations with supervisors. The supervisors usually feel obliged to pretend they know what I’m talking about, and nod their heads solemnly as I describe the intricacies of QRT, VSG, or RTL.
One time, we had an acting manager who was not exactly a mental giant. I printed up a fake graph entitled FTQ -Factored Transit Quotient, had it getting progressively worse over the June quarter, and stuck it on the noticeboard. When this woman walked past, I stated quizzing her about it, and complaining that the staff hadn’t been told what FTQ was, and how it would affect us. She told me she was busy, and would “explain it later”. She must have gone to see the State Manager for New South Wales to quietly ask him what it was, because he came to see me later, and couldn’t stop laughing. It was good fun.
Heh, no-one’s mentioned Gus from Drop the Dead Donkey yet?
Sunspace, feel free to use that line in a sig. You don’t even have to give me credit for it, I’m just tickled pink at the thought of something I said being quotable 
Extend my condolences to your friend, I went through a similar “rightsizing” this past March.
Oh, in baseball, a runner is supposed to touch the bases…if he forgets to touch one, he’s out. “Touch all the bases” is an annoying version of “dot your Is and cross your Ts” (what, nobody dots Js anymore??)
Thanks, Sunspace, you’ve made my day…
Gawd, this thread takes me back to the late 1990s.
I’d listen to NPR on the way home from work. The list of corporate sponsors that was announced every so often on All Things Considered read like a BizSpeak roll call. One particularly annoying sponsorship announcement still gets to me …
“Valicent. Valicent offers robust, end-to-end solutions to dynamic Global 500 corporations. Vericent, at velicent.com.”
Okay … what’s a robust end-to-end solution? What’s a Global 500 corporation?