Doesn't the phrase "add color" go back at least to the century-old idea of a "color" commentator (who operates opposite the "play-by-play" commentator) of sports radio and later sports TV? I'd be pretty surprised if this wasn't used for things outside of sports before MBAs started using. And if the MBAs invented the turn of phrase, I'd say it's clever and evocative!
This seems very different than mere business euphemism like "realize negative gains".
That's interesting, I had never heard the term being used in English, but in Chile it is a very commonly used term "darle color" is synonym to exaggerate something
I do wonder if they arose in the same way, from color commentators
Seeing all the phrases my old colleagues used has really solidified that leaving consulting was a good choice for my own sanity. Stop trying to ping me on a go-forward basis to utilize and action upcoming synergies in a fulsome manner!
My desk at an old job was adjacent to the desk of the woman in charge of a safety process (some variant of 5S and something else, I think). Every week there'd be a small gathering at her desk including a couple managers and people from some other departments (not sure what their roles were otherwise, the managers I knew were a few levels above me in engineering).
I heard nearly every buzzword bingo term during those meetings. I swore off the idea of every becoming any kind of manager after that. Fast forward a decade, I'm pissed off with how things aren't working and aren't changing so I opt myself into a management adjacent position ("process improvement"). I ended up in many, many more management meetings than I ever want to and learned that there were still more buzzword bingo words for me to learn! I escaped after a time because I realized that they were just playing a convoluted drinking game (I think if you say or hear "synergy" 1000 times it's guaranteed to make you an alcoholic, but the drinks are after hours instead of when the game is played).
You could replace orthogonal and immutable perhaps, but idempotency has a rather precise technical definition that doesn't really have any synonyms. It's a useful word too, because idempotency is generally a very desirable property to have in many systems.
If you do any kind of system automation, it would get quite cumbersome if you had to keep talking about operations which only effect change when they actually need to.
But I like to think that using precise technical terms such as "idempotent" is perfectly fine. "Immutable", works as well, since you have "mutable", and "mutation" to go with it. Both also carry a lot of contextual information that make them hard to replace.
(There has to be a proper linguistic term to describe these properties)
I like that orthagonal suggests that they definitely intersect, but go in two different directions. Unrelated is too harsh in most of the situations you'd use orthagonal.
Well, orthogonal lines don't have to intersect in in geometry (you just need more than 2 dimensions), and "intersect" is meaningless in algebra. So, I don't think that's really implied.
It's not about education or vocabulary. It's about using words to make yourself sound important, when you're not.
The problem is that people who don't have a good vocabulary abuse these words and change their meaning for self-serving purposes, and not to communicate.
I think there's two different readings of "side effect free" here. The fact that nothing happens on the second+ invocation is, for me, the example of no unwanted side effects. An unwanted side effect might be sending more voltage down the line on each invocation...120, 240, 360.
Side-effect is a very well-established term, though[1]:
> In computer science, an operation, function or expression is said to have a side effect if it modifies some state variable value(s) outside its local environment, that is to say has an observable effect besides returning a value (the main effect) to the invoker of the operation.
> The fact that nothing happens on the second+ invocation is, for me, the example of no unwanted side effects.
I don't think you'll ever find a definition that says something about second invocations.
Well, per others' responses the "no side effects" part is not quite accurate. The definition in plain English is actually pretty simple: idempotency = "has the same effect, no matter how many times it's run". Like a dedicated "Power On" button (vs a "power toggle" button).
Don Watson's Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words: Contemporary Cliches, Cant and Management Jargon (2004) seems very similar in tone to Unsuck It. It has political and corporate-speak, with real-world examples! The best part is the biblical/Shakespeare/traditional sayings with the weasel words substituted. So funny. (He wrote another, Worst Words: A compendium of contemporary cant, gibberish and jargon (2015) which I haven't seen but guess is similar)
I am disappointed that ‘actionable’ doesn't present the original meaning — providing cause to take legal action — given how well it typically fits corpspeak in place of the intended one.
I used to hate all that nonsense, then at some point in the last 15 years I got assimilated. Though, I still can't understand anything an executive says.
Yeah, normal words like "reaching out" (said the way Neil Diamond says it, with some seriousness and a straight face). It turns professional life into melodrama.
"ping me" does have a useful connotation, though, like "touch base" or "give a heads-up" it suggests a pretty minimal communication, just to let someone know that something has or will occur. Making a distinction between a short notice that can be followed up on if needed, vs. a more detailed memo or report.
The one all the cool-kid execs are using these days is "lean in to" as a replacement for the boring "focus on". As in "We're going to be leaning in to Cloud and Chat Apps this quarter in order to grow our investment into execution and innovation..."
This is like saying “another word for car is ‘vehicle’”. It’s not the same thing.
Maybe it’s an outdated expression, but it still signifies a person who crossed a country’s border illegally and does not have legal status.
Maybe in some libertarian circles where there ideologically are no such things as borders this would be true, but the world exists, countries exist, laws exist and changing words to suit an ideology instead of facts is kind of silly.
P.S. I got to “Illegal Alien” by entering “Synergy” then following along.
> Maybe it’s an outdated expression, but it still signifies a person who crossed a country’s border illegally and does not have legal status.
Actually, it doesn't even mean just that, that's just the popular perception. Anyone not present legally would be an illegal alien, even if they crossed the border legally. I knew many international students who became illegal aliens due to overstaying their visas or who violated their visa in some way through work they did.
It's not necessarily the words themselves, but the type of person who is associated with them. And I hate it when a word I like gets appropriated by unlikable people.
"Touch base" and "Bio break" are an exception. Makes me squeal every time, no matter who uses them.
"Synergy" haunts me, as well as repurposing words like "ideation". If I play word association, "suicidal" is the only context where "ideation" sounds correct.
Clicked on browse, and then read the first term for 'above the fold'. pure gold
Unsucked:
The mystical location on websites where advertisers want their ads to appear. Originally referred to physical newspapers, which folded in half and made money from advertising. Today, newspapers don’t have advertisers and just fold.
I know I'm venturing off-topic here, but I believe "above the fold" in the newspaper world referred to story prominence on the front page rather than advertising.
I don't recall, even long ago, seeing ads on real newspapers that were both front-page and "above the fold". I imagine "above the fold" wasn't related to advertising until the web existed.
This applied only to broadsheets (New York Times), and not to newspapers that used tabloid layout (Chicago Sun-Times).
The reason "above the fold" was valuable real estate was because whatever was there would be visible in newspaper vending machines, newspaper racks, and the stacks at kiosks.
Newspapers that printed on tabloid-sized paper didn't have that problem, since they were not folded horizontally.
Tabloid newspapers were generally read by the working class and were sized so that they could be read on trains, buses, and communal lunch tables. Broadsheets were read by the bosses who had private offices, individual desks, and space to spread out.
I recall the Chicago Tribune putting ads in the masthead, usually a reference to a promotional story lurking deeper inside the paper. And then there was this.
When I studied journalism in the early '90s our professors drew a direct correlation between newspapers that showed ads "above the fold" and those that didn't. According to the profs if they practiced the former they were clearly not real journalistic enterprises. USA Today did it and they used it as a case that proved their point. How times change.
That's interesting. I can't find a picture of a paper USA Today with an actual advert front page, above the fold. They do put little gossipy teaser type "boxes" there that I guess could be considered "ads" to read a story in their Celebrity section. But no actual advertisement for some 3rd party product or service. Not saying that didn't happen, but it's at least not easy to find.
Would that it were so simple to assess the value and integrity of individual voices vying for attention among the roaring cacophony that is the internet.
Around here they did exist, but were not so prominent, usually in a sidebar or topbar format. I think they were more common on slow news days, which both does and doesn't make sense.
They became more common overall as newspapers declined; how prominent they are now, I don't know, because the dead tree edition isn't worth reading anymore.
Which made sense when everyone was browsing at 800x600. But these days who knows what the size of an initial page view is. Not just devices, but windows within those devices.
Publishers have good information on a per ad slot basis telling them how likely they are to be initially on screen. It's not yes/no, the way it would be if everyone's screen was the same size or on a physical newspaper, but percentages are still useful.
This seems very different than mere business euphemism like "realize negative gains".
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