The word nerd’s plight
By Penelope Whitson,
I’m a word nerd. I like words. I like to roll them round in my mouth as though they are foolishly expensive Swiss chocolates.
"Haberdashery," I whisper to myself.
"Flabbergasted."
"Tomfoolery."
Dictionaries are my porn. I keep a thesaurus under the mattress.
But office language is an area where my love of words has slowly morphed from a fun-loving lusty red into a furious, seething purple-black hole of loathing.
Workmates and their language skills come in a variety of guises. There are those who barely speak, those who indulge in verbal wankery (often incorrectly) and the lowest of the low – the acronym addicts. Shooting up daily in front of whomever they can. They’re too lasciviously tonguing KPI to hear you explain that actually, it’s not an acronym, it’s an initialism. (Go on, look it up.)
While mouse-like colleagues can be irksome in that they don’t squeak unless you dangle cheese in their direction, they are, on the whole, much nicer to sit next to than a jargon whore. You know the type. The person who uses mitigate a lot. Even when they mean militate. They utilise things, but never use them. They’d rather ameliorate than improve, and salivate while discussing their bespoke development. The rate at which they talk about targets, incentives and managing expectations suggests they win frequent flyer points each time the words are uttered.
They are also excessively fond of capital letters.
However, they do have an amusing side – which is when they insist on using words incorrectly. ‘I’ll investigate and revert back to you next Monday. We can then advice the client.’
And then there are the lovers of ASAP. Pronounced A-sap. Like a rapper, yo. There’s a limit to how many initialisms or indeed acronyms you can use in one sentence but there’s always someone in the office keen to test that. Often I have no idea what they’re talking about. Sometimes I wonder if they do, either. Possibly they’re just tying random collections of letters together to mess with me.
But they keep popping up. I recently had to ask what SME meant. Subject matter expert, apparently. Or, as I was informed: “Smug bastards with no time allocated to your project that you have to speak to in order to do your own work.” I hasten to add that that is of course, just one person’s interpretation. No doubt you have your own. It might even be complimentary.
Just this morning someone wished me HNY. Happy New Year. It’s 2012 and I feel the end is nigh.
Comments
Jody
I once had a colleague refer to a SME like it was a title - as in, “Mike is the smeeee for the project”. Instant mental image of Captain Hook's sidekick, cowering and rowing the boat away from the crocodile…
Travis Cottreau
Ah… the office jargon. I wish I could say “You either love it or hate it”, but anyone who loves it is probably a sociopath. I think it's more like, “You either put up with it reluctantly or you hate it with a passion.”
My recent “favourite” - “Oh no! We aren't making them redundant, it's just that their positions have been disestablished.” Before that, it was, “We aren't outsourcing that job to India, we are co-sourcing it.”
Dan Ariely, an economist, showed in a recent experiment that people are far more likely to cheat, if, rather than taking money when they cheat, they can take tokens that can then be exchanged for money 15 seconds later. Even that TINY bit of abstraction is enough to make them cheat more.
Imagine an entire multi-national company where all the people have been abstracted. It makes it much easier to get rid of “resources” rather than a single mum with kids who really needs the job.
aimee whitcroft
Oh, man, yeah. I remember the first time I heard FTW (full time equivalent). I was working as a management/strategy consultant, and a colleague had been talking about how he loved getting companies to trim down their FTEs so as to be all streamlined. He meant having people fired, of course, but FTE is an abstract notion, and doesn't remind one that it could mean 'that guy who's not doing really well because he's being badly managed and has a lot on his plate, as well as a family'. It scared me a lot, and was one of the factors that led to my quitting the industry a few years alter.
Also, there's another problem: jargon, while useful within a group, can be extremely damaging when different groups are attempting to communicate. And, if only basically, understand each other. [I wrote a little article on it a while back, looking at science and business, both of which I've worked in - http://bit.ly/ywipml - please note, that headline is NOT mine]
And, a final point - another horrifying thing I've noticed is people's emails in general. Particularly from people who write for a living. I've received emails from such people which have weird line breaks, capitalisation, appaling punctuation and spelling - all sortsa things. I mean, seriously guys - how hard is it to write coherently?
FTE
WTF? Are you all serious? Who cares. Close this page and do something productive.
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