Bad language must be punished
It’s time to get tough on the jive-talking jargonistas and lecture-circuit logopaths who persist in ****ing up the Queen’s (or President’s) English.
Renditionable words and phrases listed below.
Cute the first time, but not any more
goodness: when used in techy contexts, as in ‘filled with API goodness’ or ‘pure XSLT goodness’
love: as in ‘we’re loving the new desktop’ or ‘that kitten meme is getting a whole lotta love down here in W1′, ‘get a little API loveliness’
stuff: as in ‘cool stuff for your iPod’
-ista: as in Pythonista, Cameronista, jargonista (see above)
play space, sand pit: as in ‘this is the project play space, this is the sand pit’
Down with the subculture
Any phrase like ‘down with my homies!’ or ‘epic fail!’, uttered by people who should know better: sometimes executives, sometimes after consuming stimulants, sometimes even with hand gestures.
Tough-talking Americanisms
barn storming
boil the ocean
chops: as in ‘Steve Jobs didn’t have the chops to stick it with NeXT’
deep pocketed
spin up: as in ‘once we spin up the project’
tie the bow: as in ‘once Google tie the bow on desktop integration’
No idea what these mean, but I don’t like them
bootstrapping
burndown: as in ‘can someone give me a sprint burndown’
business logic
cadence (in an ‘agile’ project management context)
captured all the givens
convergence in terms of delivery
decisioning
ensemble of features
meme
suite: as in ’suite of applications’ or ’suite of resources’
skinnable
tech spikes
thought leaders
tick all our boxes
user journeys
viral email
walled garden
workstreams
… and these are still bad
around: as in ‘issues around resourcing’ (i.e. problems with staff); a tertiary-educated alternative to the prosaic ‘about’ or ‘with’.
issues: see around. (It’s pathetic to whine when language morphs in ways you don’t approve of, but ‘issue’ did used to be useful, as in ‘a number of complex issues’. Now the word is just a posh or euphemistic replacement for ‘problem’ — which itself is now regarded as harsh, almost rude. Similarly, when I was growing up in Australia, the good word ‘got’ was declared non-U, or even taboo: we were taught to say ‘received a letter’ not ‘got a letter’. An English professor told me that in one school, a teacher took his class outside and made them dig a big hole, then they each wrote the word ‘got’ on a piece of paper and buried it.)
offering: as in ‘Channel 4’s VOD offering’ or ‘the Salesforce CMS offering’, for some reason much loved by IT managers
vertical and horizontal: as in ‘a horizontal slice across a vertical market’
