Which phrases used by corporations turn your bowels inside-out?
My personal favorite is when companies call their employees “associates” or “coleagues”. Usually “slaves” would be more appropriate.
“Process mapping”. Cripes.
“Teaming”
“Signage”
“Dialoging”
“Utilize”
All convey to me that the speaker is insecure about his intelligence and command of language, so using simple words like “cooperating,” “signs,” “talking,” and “use” make them feel inadequate.
The latest toothgrinder to infiltrate my purview is “productionalize.” Grrrrr.
What does the word “productionalize” mean? 
Fuck if I know. You tell me.
verbiage. Who needs another word for “words”? If you are calling it verbiage, it’s pretty likely what you are writing is garbiage…
synch up - as in, I need to synch up with Tom on that. It’s especially jarring because when spoken it sounds like sink up–go up by going down?
My latest, newest non-favorite “to socialize an idea” Like, we need to socialize the new ad campaign within marketing before we take it to the VP of sales.
“submittal” (it’s “submission”)
“impacted” (not unless they’re wisdom teeth, asshole)
“We’re going to socialize X” (I bet you’re just going to go around and get a consensus. Socialize doesn’t get a direct object unless you’re doing behavioral experiments on the test engineers that I don’t know about.)
“selling off” to mean “getting customer approval on”
“This slide talks to the issues of…” (You are talking to us, about the slide. The slide isn’t talking to anyone, and certainly not to any issues!)
Nine layers of prepositions and passive voice: “The ERB is responsible for the formation of the group of engineers without whom socializing the requirements would be made more difficult during a test phase in the responsibilities matrix of the requirements verification compliance directorate.”
And of course, the ten kinds of meetings:
- tiger team
- round table
- face to face
- shoulder to shoulder
- working group (yeah, right!)
- table-top
- wall-walk
- all-hands
- splinter
- pre-meeting
…which are, by and large, indistinguishable, except that a splinter has free donuts and an all-hands is going to have lots of people asking dumb questions because they don’t realize it’s an information-only forum.
Sorry, but y’all just need to be more proactive.
Yes. It’s time to take ownership of this issue.
My ex-boss had two threadbare statements he used all the time:
“We need to be on the same page of music.”
“We all need to be team players!”
These may not qualify as “corporate speech”, but I heard those two sentences at least ten times daily for six years, and I still get a nervous tic just thinking about it. Oh yeah and I almost forgot:
“Don’t work harder! Work SMARTER!!”
I gotta go get a beer. Just typing that pissed me off.
“Human Resources.” When you think about it, it’s an incredibly stupid phrase. Cheesy. When did the simple and accurate “Personnel” go bye-bye?
Just about any attempt to turn a perfectly good noun into a verb irks me, as when my boss once asked me to “matrix the prospects.” I should have asked him, “Are you The One?”
“Internal customer”.
“Guest/Customer Opportunity”
God, this thread brought back some bad memories of former jobs I had to start a new thread…
Well, that is one way to climb the corporate ladder 
As for me, I loath the word Synergy. That and the phrase “Let’s dialouge!”. WTF? Are you an acting coach? Am I in a movie? Does my line delievery suck? 'Cause if that aint the case, then how about we just talk?
I swear, next time I hear that I’m busting out the MacBeth, and god help them if they don’t know their lines!
I don’t know if it’s because my employer is Tulsa based, or if it’s because the overwhelming majority of our employees are field hands, but fortunately I don’t get much megatrend speech.
One I do remember from the past is “deprojectmanagerize.” Gaahhh!
Thing like this are what makes me glad I don’t work in the corporate world
Heh, I don’t either, but we still have jargony words. Another un-favorite is “buy-in,” or “when your boss or your boss’s boss agrees that what you’re doing is actually useful.”
The dictionary disagrees with you.
I loved writing that things were “actionable items.” Really confused the hell out of my coworkers until they started using it, then it really pissed me off. My own damn fault though.
“You can expect senior management to give you some serious push-back on your idea…”