Weasel Word Wednesday #14 – game changer
I was surprised to receive the email newsletter from BRW magazine yesterday containing the following headline and lead:
Production technology a ‘game changer’
A revolutionary manufacturing technique ushers in a new era of mass customisation.
I’ve already devoted a WWW post to the word ‘revolutionary‘ so I won’t even start on that.
‘Game changers’ or ‘game changing’ is a phrase that has become so overused in business. It makes me want to ask the person saying it what the ‘game’ is that they are talking about. My gut feel is they don’t know, they just want to say ‘we’ll be doing things differently’ or ‘this is a really important new direction for our company’ without defining how or why.
Now I can see that in this BRW article, the ‘game changer’ reference is simply a quote of something that the executive said, but really, is such an overused cliche worth quoting?
In fact, the entire article reads a little like an advertisement, don’t you think?
The foop-baw World Cup
A FIFA World Cup themed post on phonetics today.
The first unit in the applied linguistics post-grad course I studied through Monash University was an introduction to the basics of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and so on, because the course was designed for people like me who had not necessarily studied any linguistics at undergraduate level. I really enjoyed it. It’s quite interesting to listen closely to how we really say things – and the difference between how you speak when you are paying attention to it and when you are not. As an example, most Australians I know will swear blind that they always say ‘advance’ with a long ‘a’ sound like the British pronunciation. But in a quick off the cuff question asking for the name of Australia’s national anthem, at least half said it the Australian way with the vowel sound being /æː/.
In American English, typically football is pronounced with the two syllables /fʊt/ and /bɑl/. It really made me laugh when I read how most Australians say /fʊp/ /boː/ instead – we say a ‘p’ sound instead of the ‘t’ and omit the ‘ll’ on the end. Listen next time you hear the commentators say it on TV. I particularly love how we say ‘international football’ – it’s like ‘innernashunl foop-baw’.
And while we’re on the World Cup, I just read a phonetics blog post about those vuvuzelas and why it might be hard for broadcasters to screen out their noise!
“We have no competitors”
Every time I hear an executive say this, I groan inwardly. Sure, no one else does exactly what you do, how you do it. But are there alternatives competing for the attention and dollars of your potential customers? Of course there are. So you do have competitors. Saying you don’t have any at best shows you to be a little naive. To me it shows that you can’t explain why you are different. Many businesses haven’t given enough thought to what is different about what they offer and why customers should do business with them.
My suggestion is: come up with some statements that position you in relation to two or three of your competitors. Never say anything negative about your competition – that looks worse than saying you have none. Here’s one way of saying it: “Competitor X offers much more/bigger/better X than us [X being something you don't do], whereas we offer [insert something they cannot offer or don't do as well as you can].”
I read a blog post on this subject by a young entrepreneur today who agrees that saying you have no competitors causes your audience to roll their eyes, and he suggests some much nicer ways of saying it:
no one is doing this the way we are
there are other companies working on various aspects of this problem
Unfortunately he then goes on to say that his company is doing something incredibly unique and that some entrepreneurs have a vision that is vastly unique. OK, lost me there. A former journalist colleague who I worked with in my first PR job told me never to use the word unique, because it means that there has never been something like it and never will be. This is highly unlikely and causes people to be suspicious. Also it is so overused that it has lost some of its meaning. But then to qualify it as being incredibly or vastly unique? Oh boy.
Weasel Word Wednesday #13 – catalyse
OK, I know… it’s Thursday. However this one is worth a short post.
My other half pointed out an article in an IT publication where a CEO speaking at a conference is reported as saying that:
CEOs then need to push technology group and business together – get out of project and build capabilities and catalyse change in relationship.
Apart from the fact that that sentence just does not make sense, and I’m hoping it’s a case of misquoting, it contains a bad case of turning a noun into a verb that just grates. Like ‘synergise” from ‘synergy’, which I’ve mentioned before.
** Disclaimer: I work for a competitor of the firm that this bloke who was quoted works for. I realise that my own company is just as good a source of corporate speak!
Incidents or incidences?
While I am on the subject of plurals… we have noticed several people on TV recently saying incidences when they are talking about something that has happened. I think they mean to say incidents but get carried away with the importance of the moment. You often hear this kind of overly-formal speech containing made-up long words from emergency services personnel (think the local policeman or fireman) when they are called on to give a report of what happened on TV or radio. Here’s a short excerpt from a book about common errors in English usage by Paul Brians at Washington State University, where he explains the confusion between incident, incidence and instance. However he doesn’t mention this ‘interesting’ (OK, wrong) new plural form. Language change in action?
Communication or communications?
During the week I received my copy of Communication World or CW, the magazine of the International Association of Business Communicators. The back page opinion column was a tongue-in-cheek piece about whether it is correct to use the word communication or communications in relation to my profession.
I laughed when I read it, because my first job in PR 15 years ago was with a consultancy called MACRO Communication, which no longer exists. The directors insisted (and I do agree with them in principle) that communication refers to the process of communicating which is what our jobs are all about, while communications refers to the technology or medium used to convey messages – as in telecommunications. Then I moved to a new company, Howorth Communications, which did include the ‘s’ on the end. I didn’t agree with it but after saying it for a while, I really didn’t care which one was used. That’s how it is with a lot of word usage complaints. Neither is incorrect, language use is flexible and constantly changing, get over it.
That’s really the point that Gerard Braud who wrote the opinion column in CW was making. He notes that academics are actually arguing about this stuff. Proofreaders had vehemently removed the ‘s’ when he’d used it in articles. He was expecting to receive ‘ugly e-mails’ (email or e-mail – there’s another one) from readers about it. But as he says, “In the big picture of our world, we have greater things with which to be concerned.”
Corporate-speak and cliches in journalism
Yesterday I sat in on a web seminar hosted by PANPA (the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers’ Association) in which Dow Jones’ head of content licensing Chris Pash talked about the use of clichés and corporate speak in the news media. He’d done some analysis using Factiva on how many times certain phrases appeared in publications around the world, in some cases split out by country or publication.
He made the point that clichés do convey meaning – they are a kind of shorthand that helps quickly create understanding. The problem really lies with their overuse. Corporate-speak on the other hand is more insidious because it is designed to disguise meaning.
For example, we all really know that “multitasking” means working twice as hard for twice as long doing the job of two people at once due to corporate downsizing. Chris highlighted the term “green shoots”, used in relation to the first signs of recovery from the global financial crisis started as a nice mind-picture, but which has lost meaning due to overuse.
A few interesting, funny or sad points that Chris made:
- There were more than 100,000 uses of “going forward” in a 3 month period.
- “At the end of the day” appeared 5,537 times in the Sydney Morning Herald. Just shy of the 5,647 times in the New York Times within 12 months. This phrase is particularly dismissive and basically says “I don’t care”
- Australian-isms like “fair-go” and “the lucky country” are still rife in Australian media, while “Down Under” appears in international media a lot as well.
- Some of the most-common words (read: overused clichés) in book reviews are: compelling, masterfully-written or masterful, extraordinary and even “unputdownable” which (despite it being used 111 times in The Guardian last year) even dictionary makers refuse to include.
- Travel writing is another fabulous source of clichés. Some of the most-used words in travel writing included “must-see”, “paradise”, “best-kept secret” and “exotic”
We are all used to hearing politicians, CEOs and other executive say a bunch of words that mean nothing, but as Chris said, just because someone said it isn’t an excuse for media to quote this kind of drivel. It does not add anything to the story for the reader.
HR breeds euphemisms
The information technology industry (which has employed me since 1994) is commonly accused of being the main culprit when it comes to jargon and buzzword bingo. Sure, it is the worst when it comes to three letter acronyms (TLAs). But for weasel words you really can’t go past human resources professionals.
I was reminded of this a while ago by Twitter contact @samotage who tweeted ‘HR peeps sure have some interesting terms, Embedding, Warehousing, Resource etcetera’.
Alignment, engagement, onboarding anyone? I know I’ve mentioned some of these terms here before, in relation to a software system we used to have at work called the ‘Alignment Tool’, which sounded like an instrument of torture to me.
Here’s a fantastic glossary of HR terms – read it and weep folks. And HR is supposed to be all about PEOPLE?
English translations of Korean names
Last week I read a book called Kiss, Bow or Shake Hands (the edition for Asia). A colleague recommended it to me a few years ago when I first started looking after PR in a few countries in Asia. Overall I found it really interesting, and I would definitely pull it out again if I ever travel to any of the countries included in it.
One tip included has already come in handy:
Note that Korean family names can be transliterated into English in several ways; in English, the surname might be Rhee, Yi, Li, or Lee.
This week I was searching an internal database at work for two reporters in Korea. I found both in the system each with five different spellings of their name. The family names were “Rew” or “Ryu”; and “Yun” or “Yoon” and there were also alternative spellings of their given and/or generational names.
It seems silly now, but I probably wouldn’t have realised they were all the same person before.
