

Business Words to Ban - sarahk1130
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/silverman/2009/02/10-business-words-to-ban.html

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swombat
_9\. And/or An editor once told me, "And-slash-or means 'and' or 'or,' so pick
one, unless you have no idea what you're trying to say, in which case, by all
means use it."_

I think that to some people this could seem misleading and/or incorrect.

 _8\. People manager As opposed to "Goldfish supervisor?" Seriously, this is a
"try not to offend anyone term," that makes managers of people and non-people
(whatever that is) feel less like managers or people and more like guppies._

"Manager" is a very wide term. You can manage processes, you can manage
inventories, you can manage people, you can manage documents. Is a document
manager a people manager? No.

 _5\. Take Away You take away food in a paper bag with a clown on it. Period._

Sometimes "What's the take-away from this?" can be a good quick synonym for
"What are the important conclusions and insights we should get from this?" You
might dislike it, but it's hardly ban-worthy.

Certainly, some of the examples there are pretty annoying, but I don't get the
whole "words to ban" thing... seems like a pretty weak article for a
publication by a prestigious university.

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Xichekolas
Well in normal English, 'or' is generally exclusive. _The cat is black or
red._ (Generally understood that he is one or the other, not both.)

So, to me, 'and/or' is the English equivalent of the inclusive OR. _The cat is
black and/or red._ (The cat may be black or red or both.)

Pretty sure this was discussed here a while back. (English boolean operators
versus the programming kind.)

    
    
      English     Logic
      and         AND
      or          XOR
      and/or      OR
    

So yeah, I'd agree with you in that I think the author's banning of 'and/or'
is wrong. Honestly the only ones that I agreed with were 6, 7, 8, and 10. I've
never even heard people use several of the others.

One thing I hate is my current employer's culture of referring to people as
'resources'. I am not a lump of coal or a gallon of oil thank you very much.
It took me quite a while to figure out that 'allocating resources' was a
euphemism for 'reorganizing', which is itself a euphemism for 'firing some
dead weight'.

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lgriffith
At least we now know the words and phrases that can annoy the most individuals
most of the time. The net-net is that it can be valuable. However, the bottom
line is that it is a challenge to use them in a value added way.

My take away from this article is that its a space filler. It was a slow news
day and/or his real news sources were out of pocket.

You know what I mean?

Oh well, if this is the worst we will have to deal with today, its going to be
a good day.

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aristus
"challenge". So many people have installed this regex in their speech centers
I wanna cap 'em with a pipe wrench:

    
    
        s/problem|issue|difficulty|flaw|bug|shit don't work/challenge/g

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ewiethoff
An annual favorite of mine: Lake Superior State University Banished Words List
(<http://www.lssu.edu/banished/>)

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cbd
Really on target!

~~~
pg
Do you really think our software for detecting voting rings is this primitive?

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Xichekolas
On that topic, how do you handle the case where a user registers a dozen
accounts and then uses them all to vote up his 'main' account? Are IPs tracked
or something?

Or is this something I could find out by looking an the source you released
for this site?

~~~
pg
The abuse protection code looks at a bunch of things. IP addrs are the
easiest, but it also looks at others. Sorry I can't go into more detail.

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jaysylvs
great piece

