I’m currently doing some freelance work for a large publisher. I just received an email inviting me to attend a “concepting meeting.”
Yesterday there was another email urging us to “surface any concerns or comments.”
English is really quite wonderful, isn’t it?
(Or, as somebody or other put it years ago in a reworking of the 23rd Psalm as it might have been written by corporate overlords, “The Lord and I are in a shepherd/sheep situation and I am in a position of negative need…”)
And in the spirit of Northern Piper’s Agenda Committee that lacked an Agenda, the college where I sometimes hang my hat has a “Committee on Committees.” I wish the institution was large enough to have several of these; then we could have a “Committee on the Committees on Committees.”
What similar concepting have you run into lately? Please surface them for us!
I trust you asked how that stood with the company’s policy on sexual harassment?
Oh sorry, conceptING, I misread…
Once I saw a memo stressing the importance of making sure all the relevant stakeholders were “in the loop, going forward”. It wasn’t my place to ask if they’d done a proper health and safety assessment…
Someone opened a help ticket a while ago which started “I apologize for causing trouble variously, but…”
That is now a running inside joke in my department.
“share” (used in intransitively, meaning “I want to dump this on you without actually asking you to do anything about it, but I know you’ll feel obliged to”)
“reach out” meaning “contact” or “speak to” (to me, it sounds like a phoney “I feel your pain” sort of gush when it isn’t needed or actually intended)
Over the years, I’ve continued to cringe as management adopts engineering and scientific words in an attempt to sound professional. Some examples are “Leverage” (do), “Utilize” (use), “Time Frame” (schedule or opening), and “Bandwidth” (time).
And last year some executive discovered the word “Aperture”. It actually does mean an opening and they’ve been parroting it to one another endlessly. (“Do you have aperture for this project, Jim? Can you provide bandwidth?”)
In the end-of-year address, one of the upper execs accidentally got it right when she admonished we should “…open our minds and our apertures to the company to ensure long term success.”
We had one I liked. Opened by the user rather than by someone in IT on his behalf, its description started with “I hope I assigned it to the right group, my apologies if not.” Believe me man, I feel your pain… There are over 500 different groups, with names like OFC - MSW - EMEA - ACS for “user needs to have MSWord installed” (well, I don’t think that particular one exists, but now I’m afraid to look).
I have a pet peeve regarding trying to push square pegs into round holes. If you’ve got projects, you need to manage their costs and resources in a certain way; if you have very repetitive operations, project-based management won’t make much sense. Getting those corporate emails where someone tries to Kanbanize our Agile operational impulse makes my eyes hurt.
That is the funniest thing I have heard in a long time.
Maybe you should try replying to the “aperture” guy in your office with “orifice.”
“Yeah, I’ve got an orifice next Tuesday…I can get that done.”
Ugh. You said it. My last company was notorious for this. Sales guys had taken over completely, so everything got overrun with sales-speak, and the only tech-related things they ever picked up were buzzwords. So everything was “Agile”, whether it was or not, or even whether Agile was relevant to it. (They also tried to force techies to act like salesdrones. People who had completely non-customer-facing roles got dinged in their performance reviews for not selling stuff. That’s not a language thing, though, just a dumbass thing.)
Visiting a bank some years ago I saw a posted notice inviting people to choose a career with that bank. It offered, among other incentives, “individual pathing.”
This was the same bank where a teller used the word “minus” as a verb. “Your balance after I minus this withdrawal is…”
Bankspeak am strange. Accountants tend to use the word “less” to mean “subtract” or “minus”, as in:
“credits less debits” or “100 less 15 (=85)”.
Bank deposit slips usually have a line where you enter the amount of cash back you want. It’s always labeled “less cash”. There’s also a signature line labeled “Customer sign here for less cash”.
I once asked a teller if, by signing there, I would get less cash. It went totally over her head.
We may have worked for the same company. I remember being in a planning meeting where the sales people were screaming they needed a “cloud solution” and couldn’t explain what exactly they were asking for, beyond the fact that it needed the word cloud in it.
One Saturday it was my temporary job to gather the trash from the Computer Graphics lab. The boss had received a form letter from Upper Bossitiveness, something like, “Due to budget cutbacks, I’m instructing you to lay off any non-critical employees.”
The boss scrawled this at the bottom before posting it on the door. “If any of you believes he is non-critical, notify me immediately.”
