Posts Tagged 'Buzzword bingo'

Redefining the envelope

Published February 15, 2010 Research , Words 3 Comments
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A couple of weeks ago, in the comments to a previous post, Helen asked me to investigate the alarming growth in the number of press releases that claim to redefine something. As we enter Lent, when the chief operating officer of Christianity redefined resistance to temptation, it’s a good time to compile the stats on this one:

As you can see, Helen’s correct. Last year there were about two and a quarter times as many redefinitions in the PR Newswire press release database, which is the base for this graph, as there were in 2002. It’s no longer enough just to be something: you also have to pretend that you’ve also made it impossible for anything else to be it either.

And you can also add in extra words that fulfill no purpose whatsoever. This, I believe, is what people call adding value. If you’re going to go to the trouble of redefining a category, why not radically or fundamentally redefine it? I’m assuming that whoever writes the release charges extra for this.

From the press releases in the sample that I read before I got a headache and had to stop, marketing-led redefinitions break down into several types. For most of them the redefinition seems suspiciously like the old definition, with the sole difference being that there’s something else for us to buy.

(It’s an obscure point of logic, but if we allow the definition of a category to change each time that a new example of something that fits into that category comes along, then we also redefine the concept of “definition”. What seems like nothing more than a bad press release may also be undermining analytic philosophy, product by tedious product. At least that’s what I understand from reading this excellent comic book about Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Now back to the silly jokes.)

Other copywriters try harder and are pushing, or perhaps redefining, the envelope. Sometimes there isn’t even time to define the thing before it is redefined. Innovation moves so fast these days. For example, Sikorsky is currently claiming to Redefine the Future of Vertical Flight.

Meanwhile at The North Face, Chris Fanning, executive director of The Outdoor Foundation, is claiming that its online resource (a web site), means that “young leaders from across the country will be empowered to reclaim, redefine and rediscover the outdoors”. I quite like the outdoors and the online resource is admirable, but I’d have to quibble with the extent of the redefinition. Tell me if I’m wrong, but surely the only way for me to “redefine” the outdoors is to move my door? Even that seems like pretty small beer.

I’m sure this online resource will empower young leaders to learn a lot about the outdoors – with the limitation that they’ll unfortunately be indoors while they’re doing it – but many will be disappointed when they realise they can’t actually redefine it yet. The rest of us can take comfort from the fact that the outdoors will still be out there, as unredefined as it was before overwrought copywriting was invented.

All onboard

Published February 4, 2010 Research , Words 1 Comment
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A metaphorical howl of despair echoes across the internet as far as the Talk Normal inbox from Mr C of South London, whose identity I am protecting for obvious reasons:

We are in the process of being “onboarded” as a supplier by a well known IT brand. The people concerned have used this term constantly as a verb, adjective and noun in the last 48 hours. For them it is obviously normal.

Well, Mr C, the abuse you are suffering is thankfully still rare, but we should not be complacent. Though deliberate onboarding is still used only by a small number of companies, that number is shooting up. There are more onboarders living and working among us than ever; the most sickening aspect is that, for them, it’s completely normal. Look:

That’s spectacular growth for a word that has no obvious reason to exist, and which I can’t find mentioned at all until 1998. Before 2002, there is one mention of the word for every 10 million published articles in the Factiva database.

The growth is mostly from the sector that Factiva calls talent management, which is one of those phrases, like “fresh frozen”, where the first word is put there to make impressionable people feel super happy. The talent management sector produces press releases about onboarding with headlines like:

Fortune 100 Companies Will Unite at Peopleclick Authoria Global Client Conference to Discuss Business and HR Trends

Note the use of unite, which tries to make a sales conference sound like a protest rally (“What do we want? Onboarding! When do we want it? On receipt of satisfactory references!”).

I’ve even found some mentions of offboarding in the last couple of years. As a weasel-word for “sacking” or “making redundant” it has limitations: imagine calling the victim into your office to explain tactfully that you’re offboarding him, and then having to explain what you just said.

I’ll give a mug to the first firm of supply chain analysts that has the brass neck to try to sell a report about the trend towards hyperonboarding™. But I must be careful what I wish for.

Meanwhile for you, Mr C, it’s a Jordan Boob Dilemma moment in South London. Do you allow yourself to be onboarded in silence, in the knowledge that those who thoughtlessly onboard you today may onboard literally thousands of suppliers in the future? Or do you refuse to be a part of a procurement system that does this to innocent young businesspeople like yourself? It’s probably too late to save Mr C. But we must take a stand.

Forward to the future

Published January 27, 2010 Research , Words 1 Comment
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As MG Rover gradually coasted to a stop in 2003, Kevin Howe, the group chief executive of Phoenix Venture Holdings told the press that ”Going forward we will remain focused on continuing to reverse the loss situation.” Howe had a grasp of gobbledygook that one doesn’t often see, even in a group chief executive – although, bearing in mind that he was speaking to an audience of motoring journalists, he really missed the opportunity to tell us all that he was looking for a gear change, that he was parking the problem, or that previous management had been asleep at the wheel. But overused car metaphors are a different blog: today I’m thinking about his decision to “go forward”, rather than in any other direction.
I searched Factiva for the phrase “going forward we…”. I added the “we” so that the results would omit the literal use of going forward – for example the results would leave out descriptions of footballers going forward on the pitch, but capture the waffle of the club’s directors going forward at the AGM.
It’s a regular and sustained increase, even when you break apart the five-year blocks I have used. Between 1980 and 1985 I could find only six uses of the phrase. Happy days.
“Going forward” is hogging the middle lane of what-to-do-next jargon. To show this, I grouped “going forward we” to its close relative “moving forward we”, as weasel phrases, and compared them to the two non-MBA phrases “in future we” and “from now on we”. We get a Phillips Weasel Index for the trend towards going forwardness. As the line rises, people are substituting “going/moving forward” for “in the future”/”from now on”:
Between 2002 and 2009 we became about 50 per cent more likely to do something going forward than to do it either “in the future” or “from now on”.
If we really want to be nitpickers – indulge me – then I can try to use my physics A Level. Here goes: when we treat time as a fourth dimension it has a property that breadth, depth and height don’t have. To use another motoring metaphor, time is a one-way street. In three dimensions you can go back and forth, up and down, left and right. In time you’re always heading from the past to the future. You are always going forward because, without Michael J. Fox’s DeLorean car (more motoring), you can’t go back.
So it’s a waste of breath when someone tells you that he or she is going to do something “going forward”. It is redundant, unnecessary, without a function, superfluous, not needed, no longer useful.
You could argue, using this logic, that “in the future” or “from now on” is equally redundant. A good point. On the other hand, only “going forward” is really, really irritating.

Cheer up! Blue Monday will soon be over

Published January 14, 2010 Words 1 Comment
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I’m not looking forward to 17 January 2010, which at this desk will be known as Crap Sunday, one of the unhappiest days of the year for Talknormalists.

Why is this? Because Crap Sunday comes one day before Blue Monday, the arbitrary media invention of the most depressing day of the year, and so it marks the beginning of the (luckily short) season of pseudo-scientific stories which show that this day is, apparently, mathematically depressing.

If you don't know what this is you missed the 1980s

I’ve written about rubbish equations before, but much to my surprise my blog post alone hasn’t solved the problem. And so this weekend we must hunker down for the annual attack of the idiots.

Look on the bright side. For students of the asinine, Blue Monday 2010 has a lot to offer.

1. There are two Blue Mondays this year. Excitingly, some press releases I’ve seen quote 18 January, some say it’s a week later, on 25 January. This could be a demonstration of how the scientific method means our knowledge advances in small steps; its conclusions should not be taken as revealed truth; they are merely suppositions based on the best evidence that we have today. We should welcome uncertainty as a stimulus for debate and further research.

On the other hand, it might just mean that one PR company timed its campaign a week earlier than the other, and the equation is so vague and subjective that you can fit it to more or less any day of the year if you try hard enough.

2. Who should we put in the stocks and throw fruit at? Dr Ben Goldacre did the real research on this when the equation first showed up. Blue Monday was invented by Porter Novelli (“We have the right conversations with the right people at the right time”) in 2006 for Sky Travel. The idea of the equation was shopped around academics, offering them money if they claimed to have derived it. Dr Cliff Arnall, at the time a temporary lecturer at the Cardiff University Centre for Lifelong Learning, grabbed the opportunity and made some good publicity for himself – though his former employers seem less delighted. He has no genuine insight into the day when you are least happy, but at least he has “Dr” in front of his name. If we could only get a picture of him in a white coat, then Blue Monday would be so much more credible.

3. How do we give depression more pizazz? The question has been asked in a thousand marketing brainstorms. One genuinely sad aspect of Blue Monday every year is the miserable attempt by some PR companies to inject pep into unhappiness by telling us to buy something. Recall that the whole sham was set up to sell holidays; other people use it as an excuse to bung out a lightweight “why not buy this?” press release – just as long as they don’t get too hung up on the depression thing. For example:

Blue Monday is believed to highlight a more general temporary gloominess for a usually more balanced and positive population, says Caroline Carr, hypnotherapist and author of the just published Living with Depression.

General temporary gloominess: translation - ”as a therapist, how can I describe this fictional marketing construct as if it was real so that I can plug my book without overstepping any kind of regulatory guidelines.”

Journalists trot out exactly the same Blue Monday feature every year, partly because the end of January is pretty barren if you’re looking to fill the inside of a local paper. You did detox diets, giving up smoking and and gym membership in week one, and it’s not time to do “Put some spark into your love life with these Valentines Day ideas” yet. Those lifestyle pages don’t fill themselves, you know.

I don’t like to miss out on a misery party and so I feel the urge to explain my personal general temporary gloominess with an equation. After as much as 30 seconds of careful research, I came up with this:

Where D is how depressed I will feel

Ci is the number of column inches given to article Ai where i=1, 2, 3, …
E is the number of times they mention that stupid equation
and delta is the number of days that this story lasts

If you want to use my formula in a meaningless and generic story about how journalism bloggers get sad when they read press releases about Blue Monday, please quote me as “Dr Tim Phillips, an expert in disappointment at the Polytechnic of Cynicism”.

How the game-changing game has changed for game-changers

Published January 6, 2010 Research , Words 4 Comments
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It comes to my notice that Google has launched a phone. But not just any old phone: Google has launched a game-changing phone. I’m not sure that anyone has explained to me the specific game that mobile phone companies are playing (though if my recent experience with Orange Mobile Broadband is any guide, one version of the rules is called Shaft The Customer), but 147 articles in the telecommunications press recently have decribed Google as changing some game or other.

This is, lest we forget, after Apple has already changed the same game. The 249 articles which describe Apple in the same way peaked in 2007, so we must assume in this case that Google is re-re-changing the game that Apple re-changed after Nokia changed it after someone else invented it. Or something like that.

When we look at telecommunications in general, few games have been left unchanged in the last two or three years. Around 2002 or 2003 it was very unusual to find anything in the telecommunications press that claimed to change any game at all. We had 30 times as many game-changers in 2009, compared to what we would have expected had game-changingness remained at 2002 levels:

It isn’t just telecommunications in which companies are claiming to have altered the game as soon as the previous permutation of the earlier mutation of the last modification has taken effect. Here’s the trend in the business press, where we find companies that change games about half as frequently, but with a similar upward trend. In 2009 we got only about 20 times as much game-changingness as we would have expected, taking 2002 as our base:

Part of this is journalistic over-stimulation: the increasing resemblance of business reporting to a Mexican soap opera. So given that some reporters are willing to write up the opening of a jar of pickle as potentially game-changing, marketers are helping by using the term game-changing to play the most important media game of all: the game of Pump Up What Your Employer Does To Make It Sound More Important Than Selling A Product. You might say that their use of game-changing has, in itself, been game-changing. If you wanted me to slap you, that is.

There’s an app for Talknormalisers, too

Published December 21, 2009 Links , Pictures 1 Comment
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What do you give your dearest office friends for Christmas, especially if you can’t be bothered to go outdoors in the snow or don’t want to buy something expensive, like a scratch card or a jumbo Twix from the vending machine? It’s possible you might want to spend 59p on the iPhone app Meeting Magician, which is produced by this guy. It helps to while away the time in dull meetings.

It would be stretching the point to call it useful, but it allows you to work out how much money you’re wasting in your meeting, and as you can see from the video it will even set up an automated fake call to get you out of the room in a “sorry, I’ve got to take this” sort of way – so that you can go and read Talk Normal instead while the people still stuck in the meeting room stare daggers at you through the glass wall.

If you were thinking of buying one for me, thank you – but I’ve already got it. On the other hand I don’t have the Associated Press Style Book iPhone app yet, mainly because it costs $28.99! Strewth. It’s like a tax on competence. But, if you want to thank me for all the graphs I’ve drawn for you this year, I’d be delighted to receive it: imagine my happy face when, I finally work out, where to put my punctuation.

The Plattie 2009: and the winner is..

Published December 14, 2009 Research , Words Leave a Comment
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Plattie

It’s awards season, and you don’t need one of my fancy graphs to know that more bullshit has been published in the last 10 years than in any decade in history. I wanted to recognise this by giving Talk Normal’s first Platinum Bullshit Award (“Plattie”). What better way to celebrate than giving the award this year to the Gobbledygookiest Press Release of the Decade?

How to measure this? Luckily, I’m not the only person who snoops around in Factiva looking for bad communication to make fun of. David Meerman Scott, who has many more Twitter followers than me (I started late but I’m catching up - and at the time of writing, with almost 100, have only 31,416 more to attract), wrote one of the best anti-gobbledygook manifestos in 2006 with the help of the Factiva Reputation Lab’s text mining tools. He established a list of the most over-used rubbish gobbledygook phrases in the language, and did some entertaining analysis on them. Download it here.

In order, Meerman Scott’s top 10 worst offenders were: next generation, flexible, robust, world class, scalable, easy to use, cutting edge, well positioned and mission critical. I’m sure I’ve listened to keynotes where all of them came in a single sentence, but it takes some nerve to commit more than two or three of them to a single press release and then let other people see it.

different plattie

I wanted to give my first Plattie Award to the press release that had used the most words from his list. When I searched PR Newswire on Factiva I imposed one rule: I looked for single releases that were 2000 words or less to exclude the “mega press pack” effect – because, like with an infinite number of monkeys, if you leave enough press release writers in front of a computer for long enough, then combine their output together in a single giant release that describes a really rubbish trade show (for example), it might have every piece of drivel ever conceived in it. Imagine a release like that! Well, I’ve witnessed one, and let me tell you: it’s like staring at the sun – but not in a good way.

First of all I searched Factiva for releases using the worst phrase (next generation), then the worst two used together, and so on. There have been more than 77,000 releases which talk about next generation something-or-other, with Factiva reporting that the top five offenders are Microsoft, Motorola, Lucent, Sun and Texas Instruments. Add flexibility, and the number drops to less than 9,000, but – get this – the same five companies are the five most frequent transgressors.

At this point we note that, from now on, no one outside of the technology business even gets into the top ten.

Add another term (robust), and we’re down to around 150 releases per year. Lucent temporarily drops out of the power five, and in comes Intel. Only one in 10 of these releases – barely more than one per month at this stage – adds the claim of world classness to this potent mix. Intel’s gone, Lucent is back, and in a move that will be satisfying to many in Scott McNealy’s inner circle, Sun is suddenly gobbledygook provider number one, ahead of Microsoft! It couldn’t win the technology war, but when it comes to the battle to put the four most overused crap phrases into a press release most often, Sun finally bests its bitter rival. Factiva tells me Sun also had the largest share of the 60-odd releases that include scalability with the other four.

Eliminate every press release that carelessly fails to mention easy to use, and we’re down to six releases in 10 years. Could anyone use every one of the top seven gobbledygook terms in one press release? Sun falls at the final hurdle and is beaten by…

Lucent, the only company in history that dared to add cutting edge to the other six phrases and still send the release out.

When, in 2006, Lucent announced that Six New European Value Added Distributors Contract to Resell Lucent’s Security Portfolio, the press office probably had no idea that it was epitomising what historians will come to regard as the Decade of Twaddle. Ms Martina Gruger-Buhs and Mr Peter Benedict, your names were on the document; but something tells me this was a collaborative effort. Commiserations to Sun Microsystems too: no one could have tried harder.

An epidemic of word obesity

Published December 9, 2009 Pictures , Research , Words 3 Comments
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I was doing some media training recently and one of the people in the session was told to stop speaking like she was trying to sound clever. This is good advice, if only more people would take it.

Instead we’re busy piling on the syllables like there’s no tomorrow, because why use a short word when there’s a long one that’s half as good?

Even the simplest words get bloated when we’re busy trying to sound clever. Here’s an example: you don’t get much simpler or more effective than the verb to use. We all know what it means, it’s perfectly clear, say it in a meeting and no one will misunderstand you or point at you and giggle and shout “durr!” because you’re simple.

But when we leave for work we take easy-to-understand “use” and stick an extra two syllables in it, and it becomes conference-room-hell-word “utilise”.

And it’s getting much worse, very quickly. Look at the Phillips Weasel Index (PWI) of the relative frequency of use and utilise (I included utilize, for our international readers) from 2002 to the end of 2009: the higher the graph goes, the more we are substituting “use” out of the language for “utilise” – a word that takes us longer to say and type, but we think it makes us sound like we’ve done an MBA:

As you can see, that’s a rise of more than 60 per cent in seven years. This PWI increase is consistent across technology, business, software, telecoms and media. The exception is for press releases, where there has been no rise in the PWI since 2002. Way to go, press release writers!

Actually, it just shows that you started writing badly earlier than the rest of us, and you continue to outperform. In 2002 you were about three-and-half-times as likely as a journalist to stick “utilise” instead of “use” in your paragraph in a misguided attempt to make your client sound clever, and now it’s down to a factor of about 2.3 as we catch up (or maybe put less effort into rewriting your releases). At this rate I worked out that the rest of us will be as bad as you by July 2022, which is something for our kids to look forward to.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t start obsessing over individual words like a crazy person who complains that the world isn’t what it used to be. Do too much of that and I’ll be the sort of person who listens to John Gaunt.

But it makes me cranky that we talk one way at home and a different way in the office to sound smart. It’s a word obesity epidemic , and 1 January 2010 might be a good time to go on a diet.

Selling empowerment by the pound

Published December 7, 2009 Links , Words Leave a Comment
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no lack of power here

If you’re lacking power, don’t worry. There are a lot of people who can sell you something for that. At the time of writing, about 80 press releases in the last week were promising some form of empowerment.

Whether it’s from the ambitiously named Empower MediaMarketing (“Understanding is the bottom line”), which among other recent empowerments organised a Discovery Channel Shark Week promotion for Long John Silver Fish Tacos, or the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association (“to inspire, empower , educate and entertain by showcasing the best golf professionals in the world”), or even the Center for Applied Identity Management Research’s ongoing efforts “to empower and engage with clients in combating identity theft crimes and mitigating fraud”, there’s a lot of empowerment available – if you can pay for it.

Which isn’t really the point of a word that once described how you give victims of discrimination or poverty the ability to change their lives. Empowerment had an ethical and political meaning, which doesn’t have much relevance to tacos or golf.

The releases that mention empowerment on PR Newswire confirm that empowerment in 2009 usually involves a commercial transaction. It’s empowerment in the sense that if you buy a pair of jeans from me, I empower you to wear some new trousers.

Or, rather: “Possession of the Talk Normal LegRight Solution (TM) empowers the global community of potential denim-wearers to actualise our jeans dreams!” See? We can all get into the action.

According to Factiva, quite a few businesses are getting into it. Empowerment went almost unmentioned until recently, but not now:

I get it: it’s no longer enough to sell us a product, we have to buy a better life. Marketers have hijacked the idea of empowerment to do this, because it’s a no-risk proposition. “We don’t make promises,” these empowerers tell us, “we just sell you something to help you change yourself.”

They don’t make you happy; but they are willing, for a fee, to claim they empower you to achieve happiness. It’s not their fault if you’re too stupid, ugly, poor (or powerless) to make the best of it.

Commercial empowerment: if it works they take the credit. If it doesn’t, that’s your problem.

The dictionary of everything (even Talknormalism)

Published December 4, 2009 Links , Words Leave a Comment
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The comedian Dave Barry wrote: “If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.” We’re about to find out.

An article in Prospect Magazine (sorry the link only gives you the first few paragraphs, but enough to get the idea. And I do recommend subscribing, it’s a good read) tells us about a new dictionary called Wordnik, which has about 4 million entries, six times as many as the OED. This is because Wordnik isn’t printed, so the dictionary’s size is limited only by the size of its hard disk. When Wordnik finds new words it’s not snobby. It simply adds them to the database with the context in which it found them (for example, the tweet or the blog post). It doesn’t make arbitrary judgements as to what is a “proper” word or not, it just reflects what people are typing.

I like two things about Wordnik. First, the way that it uses the context in which it finds words to show meaning, so we can spot the enemy in its natural habitat. Take an example of recent office jargon like deliverable, for example (looked up 72 times on Wordnik so far, presumably by people at their desks thinking “I have to give them a what?”). The traditional dictionary definitions (Capable of being, or about to be, delivered; necessary to be delivered) don’t give any clue that it has become one of those words that sets our teeth on edge. But read the sentences provided as context instead, and you soon get the full horror.

The second is that is gives me the chance to make my mark on history. Talknormalism has not yet been discovered by Wordnik, but I would like to believe it’s a matter of time (it would help if you’d retweet it and blog it about a bit until I’m picked up). Imagine my pride when I point a bony finger at the entry in Wordnik in the years to come, and say to awestruck youngsters, that’s my word, that is.

Meanwhile if you’re at a loose end for the end of the week, use Wordnik to pick a random word: I discovered I was the first person to look up taxable-equivalent, but the 305th to look up cake. So in this case, at least, we’ve still got our priorities in the correct order.

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