More evidence that the worm turns: A positive rebellion is under way in Britain against the worst excesses of crapspeak, that cleverly metaphorical slang that corporate types and bureaucrats like to speak. (You know the guy who must always say "challenges" instead of problems, or "stakeholders" instead of customers; he's proficient in crapspeak.)
Recently, a decree went around to local authorities in England and Wales - town and county councils, mostly - from the body that governs them, forbidding use of a long list of popular crapspeak terms. The Local Government Association sent out a list last week of 100 "non-words" for councils to avoid.
According to The Associated Press, the list exhorted government officials to replace "revenue stream" with income and to avoid cryptic code words such as "coterminosity," meaning an overlap of administrations.
"Stakeholder engagement" can easily be replaced by "talking to people," the chairman of the association said.
Almost simultaneously, a writer for the BBC's online magazine posted a rant about the mindless cheeriness of the most popular catchphrases in business. Lucy Kellaway is on a campaign against "going forward" in particular, which, as we have noted, is used by every inarticulate person who wants to make some reference to the future. She accuses business folk, with their optimistic blue-skying and reaching out, and leveraging, all their synergies and passionate commitments to visions, of being brainlessly upbeat. "All the celebrating, the reaching out, the sharing, and the championing, in fact, grind one down," she writes. "The reality is that business is the most brutal it has been for half a century."
The response to her column stretches on for several pages, and it contains her readers' least favourite current buzzwords. BBC types, at least, are unanimous: Stop trying to dazzle us with the latest corporate metaphors. They don't want to hear "product evangelist" or "platform atheist" any more. They don't want to be told to "touch base offline" (for "meet"). They are not impressed by cradle-to-grave, holistic solutions or prepreparing or forward planning. They are tired of pipelines and spaces (as in "How can I help in this space?") Many object to the verbing of nouns, as in actioning, tasking and incentivizing. They laugh at the tendency of pompous managers to mix their metaphors wildly, as in "You can't have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music."
There were some new ones that I, being at a distance from office culture, had never even heard: Apparently people are talking about "granularity" now, meaning detail. "We're going to do a high-level overview and then deal with the granularity going forward." A granular report is not, as you might think, a gritty one, or on the subject of sugar, but one that deals with specific technical issues - what crapspeak users used to call "the micro level."
My own most hated buzzword these days is "cascading." This is a euphemism for "toeing the party line." Say you work for a communist government. The Politburo decrees that the intelligentsia, last month's heroes, are no longer the intelligentsia; from now on they must be referred to as counterrevolutionaries. Your job as junior functionary is now to eliminate the term intelligentsia from all party documents and to spread the word counterrevolutionary. If you don't, of course, you will lose your job. A very simple and old-fashioned idea, really. But modernized with "cascading!"
Say you work at a large public broadcaster, for example, and you are very nervous about losing your job, because there is a new regime in place and the new regime despises what you used to do, so you simply change your views on things: You start repeating the new mantras on popularity and diversity. You're not behaving like a spineless sheep, you're cascading!
"Cascade theory" actually started as a pejorative term: It was invented by economists to describe blind follow-the-herd behaviour. Management fads not based in actual research are examples of cascades. Informational cascades occur when large numbers of people believe something just because everyone else does.
Why corporate types would now embrace the term as something to emulate is mystifying. Perhaps the use of the word cascade is itself evidence of the worst kind of cascading.
The term is even more confusing because it has another specific meaning in computer programming. This usage trumps: No business-speak will ever compete with technical jargon for complete impenetrability. Here's a definition of (programming) cascading: "Cascading is a feature-rich API for defining and executing complex and fault tolerant data processing workflows on a Hadoop cluster." All right, all you CEOs and PR managers, you want to play with the big boys, beat that. That, my friends, is jargon 2.0.
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