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’, or ‘get a little API loveliness’
stuff: as in ‘cool stuff for your iPad’
-ista: as in Pythonista, Cameronista, standardista, jargonista (as used earlier in this post…)
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. ‘Totes amazeballs’ is really bad.
Tough-talking Americanisms
barn storming
big ask: especially as an adjective, as in ‘That’s a big-ask programme for a young pianist!’
boil the ocean
chops: as in ‘Steve Jobs didn’t have the chops to stick it with NeXT’
deep pocketed
hella (Californian for ‘very’): painful when used by non-Californians
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
agile
bootstrapping
buckets: as in ‘vertical cost buckets’
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
skinnable
suite: as in ‘suite of applications’ or ‘suite of resources’
tech spikes
thought leaders
tick all our boxes
turnkey
user journeys
value: as in ‘we believe that Adobe is uniquely able to bring new value to the setting’
viral email
walled garden
wind: as in ‘there is a strong following wind behind the drive to open adoption’
workstreams
New ways to patronise
helpful: as in ‘that’s not a very helpful remark’
confusion and misunderstanding: as in ‘there’s been a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding about the party’s policy in Iraq’
‘That’s a very good question!’: as in ‘I’m not going to give you an answer.’
… and these are still bad
adjectives as nouns, even worse with an adverb: ‘We took everything good about the platform, and added a dollop of unbelievably great!’, ‘Your new app is just a whole lotta awesome!’
around: as in ‘issues around resourcing’ (i.e. problems with staff); a tertiary-educated alternative to the prosaic ‘about’ or ‘with’
conversation: as in ‘this is a conversation we need to have with the licence fee payer…’, or ‘The Role of Strategic Conversations with Stakeholders in the Formation of Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy’
issues: see around. (It’s pointless to whine when language morphs in ways we don’t like, 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 is 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
refresh: as in ‘business refresh’ (initiate a round of redundancies…) or ‘technology refresh’ (…then buy iPads for all the VPs)
relevant and interesting: as in ‘get the data on a map, then find ways to make it relevant and interesting’, aka get the cart before the horse
vertical and horizontal: as in ‘a horizontal slice across a vertical market’
Sam Dutton’s blog 