Posts Tagged 'Buzzword bingo'

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Forward to the future

Published January 27, 2010 Research , Words 1 Comment
Tags: , , ,
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
Tags: , , ,

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
Tags: , , ,

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
Tags: , , ,

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 3 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

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
Tags: , , ,

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
Tags: , , , ,

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
Tags: , , ,

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.

Post-PowerPoint stress disorder

Published December 2, 2009 Links , Pictures , Words 8 Comments
Tags: , , , ,

It’s not exactly pushing the boundaries to say you don’t like PowerPoint. Our common dislike has even become a sort of business non-apology apology. When someone says “I know the last thing you want is death by PowerPoint ha ha”, what they are really saying is, “Sod you. You’re getting 20 slides whether it’s the last thing you want or not.”

I was trying to work out how much of my life I have spent looking at PowerPoint slides. Over the last 15 years, as an absolute minimum, I have spent at least three hours a week looking at presentations. If I spend 12 hours a day awake and get Sundays off to sit in the corner crying softly, that’s two weeks of every year. When I got involved with the exciting worlds of business and technology, sitting in room trying to work out why I am staring at pictures of two racially diverse men shaking hands wasn’t how I saw my future.

I earn some of my money presenting webcasts, where often the preparation time includes the following conversation:

Me: What does the slide with the man punching the air in front of the graph with the line going up next to the cloud inside the interlocking oval shapes balancing on the three pillars mean?
Vendor: (consults notes) It means we add value.

I’ve collected three examples of the type of slides that have been quietly making me crazy in 2009. I know the last thing you want is death by PowerPoint, but I could make that into three bullet points, maybe add a flow chart of my slow descent into fatal madness, perhaps some clip art of a doctor strapping me into the straightjacket…

First category: What the hell are you looking at? Or: why have so many slides got pictures of casually-dressed self-consciously ordinary people looking into the middle distance on them? Like this one from Cap Gemini:

If you’re wondering what the bland expression on the face of the data centre manager is meant to imply to us, I have discovered that he’s thinking these batman pyjamas are comfortable. I offer you this as evidence: recognise the expression?

(Click on the picture to buy the pyjamas. They’re top value at £22 from Great Universal. I’m hoping for commission).

Second, if you need three paragraphs to explain the diagram then you didn’t draw the bloody picture properly. Note to IBM: when you show your diagram to people and they tell you it needs some explanation or it looks like a lot of blobs with arrows coming out of them, don’t make the explanation even more opaque than the picture:

And third, what are you graphing against what? I’m talking about diagrams with the structure of something along the bottom and then two different categories up the sides and then layers of other things at the top and then lines across the middle and then some extra blobs that don’t relate to the graph in the top corners. Best done using bright colours or 3-D shapes so that no one notices.

I know the last thing you want is death by PowerPoint but this next one might just kill you. Combining elements of all the above, here’s one from Big PowerPoint itself that just makes no sense at all:

If you created this slide, I’ll enable one more business imperative for you: I’ll give you a mug if you can explain what it means to me. If the rest of you have any slides that you think deserve an unsympathetic audience, you know who to send them to.

I take comfort in the knowledge that, though I have lost months of my life looking at these crimes against communication, I’m better off than the poor sap who spent years training as a graphic designer and then ended up having to draw them.

Icon therefore I am

Published November 30, 2009 Research , Words 1 Comment
Tags: , ,

Iconic

What have the Lollipop Person of the Year Competition and Lady Gaga’s sunglasses got in common? Oh come on, it’s not that hard. The answer is they are among the 26,000 things that have been described as iconic in the press in the last three months.

Iconicity (iconicism? iconification?), my made-up word meaning “the tendency to write that something is iconic because you can’t be bothered to think of an accurate way to describe it”, is up by a factor of about six since the millennium. Look at this graph of the use of the word in the European press. The source, as ever, is Factiva.

(If you think this is all down to overcaffeinated PR people, I think you’re wrong. Of the 46,000-odd mentions of “iconic” since the beginning of 2008, only 143 came from PR Newswire. This one’s simply lazy journalism, it seems.)

I think some of the explosive growth comes from the need to write about inexplicably famous people who don’t have an obvious talent. Calling their hair, their outfits or their body parts “iconic” is handy when there’s just nothing polite we can say.

Perhaps this is why, when I think of the word iconic, I think of money and effluent. So I had a look to see how often the word is popping up in the accountancy press and among waste management writers.

As you can see, after a slow start, much more of the accountancy trade has become iconic. The word is most often used in articles about cost reduction, the iconic financial strategy of 2009:

And the adjective is trending strongly in the waste management and sewage sectors too:

It pleases me that, in this category, the word iconic comes up most often in articles about the stuff that the industry calls solid waste.

Also iconic

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Cut out your waffle: buy my book

Type your email and click the button and you will automatically get every new post.

“This excellent collection” (Director Magazine). Click to order:

I tweet

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 171 other followers