Buzzwords

Buzzwords are pet words and phrases, beloved of their employers, resented by everyone else. A significant cause of Management Speak, unchecked (and possibly unwittingly exacerbated) by the best efforts of campaigners such as the Financial Times' Lucy Kellaway to stamp them out.

Buzzwords come in various forms:

Technical buzzwords, while often entirely well-intentioned, are basically meant to make what you do sound hard. They are usually expressions which have no meaning outside the rarified heights of a given profession or calling, and little inside it. Latinisms, commonly found in legal documents, are a good example. Some achieve greatness by ubiquity: mutatis mutandis is employed with uncommon regularity in any contract or letter despite most lawyers having little conception what it means (which turns out to be not so bad, as it doesn't really mean anything). Indeed, Latinisms abound: ceteris paribus, ipso facto, inter alia, prima facie and so on, and provide joy only to those who aren't confident that their own language is capable of expressing concepts of general application. Tiring and pretentious.

"Hip" buzzwords (the inverted commas are important) are phrases that are meant to make what you do sound cool. Well, it's almost too ridiculous for words, isn't it. Would that it were so. But we all know it is true. "Hip" buzzwords are the most commonly encountered and heavily resented forms of buzzword. Because of their inherently transitory nature they tend to be auxiliary buzzwords but some of the more redoubtable examples have made it to core buzzword status.

Some examples:

• "To drill down".
• "To circle the wagons".
• "To sing from the same hymn sheet".
• "blue sky thinking".
• "To cut to the chase".
• Any sporting reference, eg, "we are approaching the end zone", or "who is going to quarterback the hiring process?"

We all do it, or spend a long and bitter career nursing resentful thoughts about undeserved underachievement. It is difficult to expound the common theme which runs through the coinage of successful buzzwordery of this category, but it seems to involve metaphors which invoke the exotic, the romantic, or the masculine (for example the examples cited above call up images of oil prospecting, the wild west and, um, going to church) since, as we all know, the practice of law and finance is perhaps the most dry and emasculating pursuit ever devised, which is why people get paid so much to do it. (It plays into the hands of the preternaturally emasculated, of course, which in turn leads to the Geek Paradox but that is a different story).

Phrases that are meant to be funny: Such as "career-limiting behaviour". What these really demonstrate is how little importance is placed on a developed sense of humour in the financial markets.

The is some convergence of buzzwords across otherwise unrelated disciplines, which suggests some buzzwords have a memetic or evolutionary power which can't be explained purely in terms of the buzzword paradox: For example, almost every sport, no matter how obscure (curling, mountain biking, jetboat racing) or lacking in actual skill or the expenditure of energy (luge riding, ten-pin bowling) as well as your common or garden sports like football and tennis, has devised expressions like "deep", "short", "long", "backhand", "inside", "outside" and "short backward square".

There are advantages and, of course, pitfalls of heavily using buzzwords.

Firstly,the continued prevalence of buzzword can be (only) explained by the strong career-evolutionary advantages they offer to a sophisticated user. Their skilful deployment can at the same time impress, delight, bamboozle and intimidate different sectors of the same audience in a way which is of uniform

 benefit to the speaker, and in this way operate rather like smart bombs in the old video game Defender; accruing maximum points and clearing out all dangerous objects in a single stroke. 

On the other hand, there is a risk of inadvertent double entendre: At the same time, used carelessly or with insufficient acumen they can prove career limiting, embarrassing and lame. A buzzword is a form of dead (or at least terminally ill) metaphor, and involves assigning a novel meaning to a word or phrase in conventional use in another (usually more exotic) context. As such, buzzwords share many characteristics with double entendres, which also involve assigning a novel (naughty) meaning to a commonly used phrase. Many of the contexts from which buzzwords are appropriated are specifically masculine endeavours, and this raises the risk of inadvertent double entendre. One needs to be careful, for example, into what (and especially whom) one offers to drill down.

There are also hidden dangers in using Compound Buzzwords which, if not carefully managed, may lead to embarrassingly mixed metaphors.