Corporate Lingo
A lot of people talk about buzzwords and acronyms when they think about corporate communication, but I tend to focus on a fascinating and really irritating side-concept: the pervasive cliche. A corporate cliche is not a buzzword because it’s not a real focus or objective (“mission statement,” etc.). It really just serves to show that you’re able to sniff the phrase out as a conversational trend and over-use it yourself.
These things spread through an organization like a plague. Right now, we’re really hot on “space.” This one drives me nuts because it’s starting to get shoehorned into a lot of places where it doesn’t even make sense. Or, shall I say, a lot of spaces.
Used properly: “He’s very experienced in that space.” “In the tight gas space, we’re making a lot of progress.”
I think it starts to fall apart when you use it as a proxy for a time period, like “in the project definition space.” That’s a phase, not a space. Rates versus gradients and all that.
And, ironically, it stumbles when you use it to denote a physical location, since you’ve so figurativized the term it doesn’t make sense in a literal connotation anymore. “Go over to Joe’s space” starts to sound like you’re in The Cell with Jennifer Lopez. We mostly use “seat” or “chair” for that, with the more humane ergonomics advocates using “desk.” Office services people use “workstation” or “work space” (that kind of fixes the whole “space” issue), but those make it sound like you spend your days stamping out Mickey Mouse erasers.
Generally, “space” will get your point across, but as it gets pervasive it’s just like, we have a billion ways to say this, why limit yourself to one? For some reason, it really makes you sound like a consultant. Like your understanding of something as a topic transcends its status as an “issue” or “area.”
This may be a pan-cultural one, but the overuse of “right?” when talking is also quite irritating, especially when you know darn well that this is the first time your talkee has heard about something. “I just approved that, right?” I don’t know, did you? Aren’t you trying to tell me that?
The paradoxical part of “right?” is that you are normally saying it only when you’re certain of what you’re saying. It’s kind of a quick two-pitch voicing, where it drops down in a “mi-re” rather than an interrogative “re-fa?”. You do a “re-fa?” when you actually are asking. A “mi-re” “right?” is just kind of dismissive, borderline patronizing. Not my favorite.
This one nears buzzword status, but “networking” is just going nutso. You’re supposed to “network” with your peers on a five minute coffee break. Can’t they just say, “complain about the length of the meeting?” I mean, if you’re on a break the issue can’t be that pressing, and in just five minutes you’re not going to tell life stories and dream dreams.
Since you’re all in the meeting together, nobody has learned the results of an interesting sports game since being removed from the outside world, so the meeting itself is pretty much all you have to talk about. Then, time permitting, it typically just digresses to where you live and how long it takes you to drive to work, or to the meeting if it’s offsite. It extends into economics if there are tolls involved. If you have older ladies in the room, you often also get some baking and grandkids conversations going.
Half the people on any meeting break are just mad that the total time of the meeting is being extended by the length of the break, and the rest of them are so busy trying to get to a bathroom or find a donut that they don’t talk to anyone anyway.
To be positive on one, I think “bio-break” is hilarious and actually serves to broaden the potty break concept without getting overly specific about bodily functions. It also covers things like food and water but suggests that the time should be shorter and more focused than a standard break, which actually serves to sidestep “networking” as the stated purpose.