Discussion on:

Most despised corporate buzzwords

Elegant!

in the context of IT projects - makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.

Plain Sailing makes me nauseous

Have been sick of it since some "Marketing Genious" made it up... when I hear of it, I just think "Dummy Terminal" and I'm not thinking of the computers...

People with no clue droning on about how the "cloud has changed everything!"

What they're (knowingly or not) leaving off is that the end of that sentence should be "And not for the better!"

Gotta go, my cat's thinking outside the box again.

... "tinkling outside the box"?

Oh, never mind.

Just tired of this one. Why can't we just say "usage"?

What about "resilience" instead. I've never understood why poeple think more sylables are more impressive.

I see them both now with frightening 'incidency'....

If you're not resilient enough we may need to reresilientize you.

... is to add a "-ness" to the end of every word. Resilienciness, Competenciness, etc.

No, wait. That's been done...

Or you can make up polysyllabic words like "orientate."

Especially when used instead of "literally".

Especially when 'virtually' was obviously meant.

I'm literally out of the box, hitting the buffers and tearing my hair out.

Any and all nouns used as verbs.

I have never understood why "proactive" is necessary. I think it's meant to be the opposite of "reactive" - but isn't that what "active" already means? Perhaps being proactive means you're doing so in a non-amateur fashion.

And with respect to "literally" - it gets used far too often to mean "figuratively" - as in "my head is literally going to explode if I read any more of these buzzwords." Really? May I watch?

Did you go off?

Right on, Palmetto! How did your selection get missed in the original list? The mission statements and other "high falutin" plans need to state that the organization is "world class". It gets pretty old, especially when used by the lower levels within an organization.

I'm also tired of seeing methodology when method is the correct term. But methodology sounds soooo important.

Don't trust the mission statement of any 'for profit' business that doesn't include some variation of 'to make money for our owners.' Anything else is just blowing smoke up your digestive exit.

We once had a VP who had us put bar codes on every stockroom rack, shelf and box because that would give us a 'World Class stockroom'. Mind you, he didn't fund any bar code readers or apps to upload the data to. Unless it's been removed, one of those labels has a human-readable shelf number, but the bar code says "Le Seuer peas, $1.25".

Right up there with 'World Class' is 'Professional Grade'. Methodology? See FDR and his damnned 'return to normalCY'.

brings up another pet peeve, the people who say "a whole 'nother' blah, blah" rather than "a whole other" or "entirely different", etc.

the root of buzzwords is misunderstanding the proper use of the English language (or any language).

To magically gloss over the fact that it is a reactive situation already.

Yes, people who have limited vocabularies tend to use the non-word "proactive" to mean the opposite of reactive. Yes, that is what "active" means.

When I ask people what they mean when they say "proactive", the definitions fit the terms "preventative", "pre-emptive", "assertive", "aggressive" and other words that already exist in the common lexicon. It is not necessary to invent a word that means many things. When it means many things to many people, it means nothing.

"Preventative" is just another syllable added to "preventive" to make it sound more important.

I think an antonym for 'retroactive' seemed necessary so 'proactive' was chosen: http://www.synonym.com/antonym/proactive/

not 'reactive' or 'retroactive', as claimed above.....

NT

but whenever I hear the term 'proactive' I think of a very busy prostitute.

Based on some of the executives' mouths I've heard the "word" come out of.

Proactive... isn't that a pimple cream?

Proactive implies an element of anticipation, whereas active simply denotes any and all activity. A proactive person would be looking ahead and taking steps to meet anticipated problems. A reactive person would wait until problems arise before tackling them and an active person would simply be doing things all or most of the time.

nt

The Greek "pro-" means "before" or "forward". It's not a bad construction, but I'd prefer a verb over an adjective. Instead of "be proactive," say "act before" (or even replace "act" with whatever action you mean).

Okay. Not so much "buzzworthy" but used (not utilized) in inappropriate places to, I suppose, sound smart.
Allow me to clear this up once and for all:

Use: You "use" something for which it's designed, i.e. you "use" a fork to eat.
Utilize: You "utilize" (here using "use" would be appropriate) something in a an alternate way, i.e. Tom "utilized" a fork to jam the door open.

Voila!

PLEASE PASS THIS ON AS IT DRIVES ME NUTS!!

Actually, there is no place that "utilize" cannot be replaced by "use" unless you are trying to impress someone or are an engineer.

I hate the phrase "Feature Rich". It seems like so many vendors/service providers have started using this phrase to describe their tools/monitoring options, even if it isn't as "Feature-Rich" as I would like.

"With this FEATURE-RICH tool you can do this, log that, and view status of these!"
"Okay, but can you categorize these to view logs in one single pane?"
"Ummm...no. I'll submit that as an enhancement request though!"

Ugh...