Many years ago, I attended a conference in Amsterdam. I knew one of the people presenting so, a week or so before I warned him that I didn’t want his presentation to feature of the words ‘leverage’ or ‘synergy’. When the day arrived, before he started, he got me to stand up in front of the assembled throng and declared that his presentation wouldn’t feature these words as I had banned them. Muted chuckling. Little did I know that EVERY senior manager who stood up thereafter had used these words in their slides and apologised each time.
Thus started my limited and ultimately fruitless campaign for plain English in business. Things have gone from bad to worse and now leveraging synergies seems wonderfully prosaic.
That said, the point of this post is not necessarily about the direct abuse of language, but lets start with that anyway.

GuffSpeak
Clearly, there is much to despise. I rue the day when “we’ll take it offline” replaced “I’ll talk to you later”. Why oh why are people “across” things now? What on earth does “Yes, I’m across that piece”. Piece! Where did that come from? “Space” was bad enough. “Yes, I’m working in the internet space.” Obfuscation space would be nearer the truth.
There are many more examples and doubtless far greater commentaries on this available elsewhere, so I’m not going to get all listy for the sake of it. We all know what I’m talking about.

Conforming
One of the most horrifying things about this newspeak garbage is that we all get sucked in (yes, even me). I’m find myself saying these things and have internal shrieks of contrition. No one ever says “What the be-jesus does ‘take it offline’ mean? I’m not online, I’m sitting at a desk, you twonk.” No, we go along with it, join in to conform. Why not, its probably not worth the hassle.

NumptySpeak
And finally I’ll get to my point. I have a feeling that all this newspeak nonsense is a way that otherwise stupid and content free people can make themselves sound inciteful and intelligent. Somehow avoiding obvious phrases and using these new forms of business mumbo-jumbo gives people a whole different aura. “Listen to me, I talk like a highly paid consultant, I have value, don’t I, well, don’t I?”.

I am reminded of some media training I did long time ago. The theory was that, when doing an interview, you think of it as crossing a river and you only ever talk about the ‘islands’ in the river. So, whatever the question, just go to the nearest island to the question and start talking. I’ve tried it. It works.
I think these new phrases have become vocabulary islands. Things to say when useful content isn’t available but some form of response seems necessary. Rather than uhm-ing and aah-ing, you can fill air time with some meaningless drivel that at least sounds clever. Its a veneer to impress/convince, nothing more.

As as aside, there is also much fun to had with this. Myself and Dame Judy Rubberbun* once went into such a numpty meeting having made up the word ‘revantor’ (sic) allegedly meaning a member of staff currently earning money/revenue from a customer. We used it. No one blinked. We heard a rumour that others had started to use it too. Fact is, the dumb ones usually think they don’t know what it means so say nothing. Try it, make up some words, its a hoot.

There are other non-verbal meeting islands to look out for in numpty meetings too. Watch out for people who take copious notes but say nothing. Note taking makes them feel like that are taking part in the meeting. Also, ticking things of lists as the meeting progresses, that’s a great one also.

I’m not saying that everyone who uses these phrases is useless. The main problem is that the long grass of language provides useful camouflage for the numpty and, for that alone, I deplore it. Listen carefully in meetings. You’ll hear it. You’ll see who they are. You’ll despise them. (If you don’t already).

That’s me been across my piece of my Internet space tonight and I’ve achieved it within the target timeframe. Shame I wasn’t revanating.

* Yes, I know, private jokes aren’t clever, but he has no web footprint at all to point at, I know, I ask you…

I’m an atheist. Its not something I generally shout or pontificate about, atheists tend not to, as pointed out by Richard Dawkins in the marvellous The God Delusion.
I’m not here (yet) to go off an any particular anti-religious rant, I just felt the urge to point out something that occured to me recently. Evolution has done some pretty daft things. Which made me think that the whole counter argument of Intelligent Design makes even less sense (if that was possible). You see, some designs are simply ‘unintelligent’.
No, before I go any further, I must apologise to all those who have doubtless pointed this out before. But it was on my mind so I going to have my own go at it. What else are blogs for?

Example 1
The thing that triggered this was, strangely, Happy Feet. I saw this shortly after I had revisited the plight of the penguins in the unerringly excellent Planet Earth. Sitting in the cinema, it gives you more than enough time to contemplate quite what a ridiculous ordeal those poor bugger penguins have to go through. -40C, howling snow storms, standing on ice, no food, standing perfectly still for the whole winter, in the dark. No TV. That doesn’t strike me as particularly intelligent design. Lets face is, there are LOTS of other places on earth to have a go at that. Nicer places, with fish, sun, maybe some earth. If you were going to go about things ‘intellgently’ you just wouldn’t come up with nonsense like that.

Example 2
“OK guys, here’s the deal, we’re going to make you one of the sea’s biggest and best predators.”
“Nice, luvin’ it, luvin’ it.”
“You’re really big, large row of teeth, huge brain, biggest on the planet and a really cool sonar thing.”
“SCORE, we are rockin’..what are we called?”
“Eh…you’re a whale, a Sperm Whale.”
“Nice, right, thanks we’re off…”
“Eh…hang on…one thing…”
“Yeah, what?”
“Eh…the stuff you eat is REALLY deep in the sea.”
“Yeah, whatever, so…”
“And you can only breath air.”
“What?”
“You can only breath air.”
“You we heard.”
“Do we get lights?”

The this doesn’t make much sense as a design either. There hardly seems a point to put an air breathing mammal in the sea (any of them). I can’t see who you would ever sit down and think, “We’ll have lots of big sea guys, but lets make it really hard for them and make them breathe air.” Wouldn’t happen. I’ve seen some people do some pretty dumb designs in my time, but nothing as dumb as that.

Example 3
The Magicicada. Wait 17 years, fly about a bit. Die. Genius.

But that is the beauty of evolution. It matters not a jot whether not it is intelligent, it just matters if it works and, crucially, works better than the other creatures trying to survive doing roughly the same thing.

It is the inherent randomness in the genetic variation that can produce animals that are forced to endure quite ridiculous circumstances, not because it makes sense, just because it works, they survive.

This is obviously just a glib argument based on the nuances of the word ‘intelligent’, but you simply have to rejoice in the wonderful, inherent randomness of it all.

But you also have to give all your sympathies to the myriad of creatures whose ‘designs’ were even worse and meant they didn’t survive. What on earth could have been going on with them?