Here's a quick way to understand business jargon

If you are a person who cares about language and who possesses an adequate sense of humor, this website is for you.

"Unsuck It" is a place to explore the ways in which “professional” communication in English goes wrong and replaces any jargon and buzzword with simple language.

This website tries to tackle, in a funny way, the process that makes the English language sometimes ugly and inaccurate, other than difficult to understand. 

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Source: Unsuck It

Aha Moment

A surprising realization.

published on: Unsuck-it

The time where a douche proclaims, “Eureka!” despite how many times you’ve told them the thing they finally realized.
It was the aha moment that turned him into a budding entrepreneur—one who understands his target market.

The douchebag who said this probably also said SEO, Upset the Apple Cart, or Sunset.

The Jargon Killer - A Tribute to Simplicity

Published: Thursday, 23 Sep 2010 10:11 AM ET

• By: Jane Wells

published on CNBC

Readers of this blog know how much I loathe the jargon thrown around by consultants and middle management types, people who want to get "granular" or "facilitate" or "circle back." Argh. Last February I blogged about all the various ways corporate America has ruined the English language by trying to sound smart rather than speaking plainly. You sent in your favorites: words like "bucketize" and "blamestorms", phrases like "deep dive" and "rigorous decomposition". Arghhhhh. Wait, what's this? Is that a beacon of reason I see on the horizon of the world wide web? A tribute to simplicity? Yes. Welcome to UnsuckIt.com. Type in your least favorite piece of double-speak and the web site translates it into something you can actually understand. It may also give you a jargon-heavy sentence to illustrate how to use the word appropriately, or it may provide snarky assumptions about the type of person who would use such language. For example, I typed in "bucketize" and learned it means "categorize". It was also shown how to use it in a sentence: "We can't boil the ocean, so let's start by bucketizing the deliverables and picking the low-hanging fruit." When I typed in "deep dive", I learned it means "focus on or explore details." But I also learned that the person who would say "deep dive" probably also says "hard stop", "show-stopper", or "net new". Net new? That's net new to me. The person behind the web site is also on Twitter, tweeting, "How many times have you heard 'aha moment' this week? 3? 4? 27? Make it stop." Aha! I like this outside the box thinking! I hope to circle back regularly.

New edition of ODE

Other words and phrases introduced for the latest edition include 'toxic debt', 'staycation', 'cheesebal' and 'national treasure'
by Sam Jones

The Guardian

The Oxford Dictionary of English has added words such as vuvuzela to the latest edition.

The World Cup in South Africa, climate change, the credit crunch and technology have all left their mark on the way we talk, the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English reveals, as the latest crop of new words to be added to its pages is published today
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Football fans will perhaps be unsurprised to learn that the vuvuzela, whose apian drone soundtracked yet another summer of hurt, has blared its way into the dictionary's pages. By being ushered into the dictionary, which is based on how language is really used, the metre-long plastic horn has cemented its immortality as well as its ubiquity.

Climate change, an issue only marginally less controversial than refereeing, has also made its mark. Even the most ardent sceptics will no longer be able to deny the existence of "carbon capture and storage" – the process of trapping and storing carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels — or "geo-engineering", better known as the manipulation of environmental processes to counteract the effects of global warming. The new words appear today in the third edition of the single volume dictionary, which was first published in 1998.

Two of the buzzwords of this economically squeezed epoch also figure: toxic debt, used to describe a debt that has a high default risk, and the rather less snappy quantitative easing: the introduction of new money into the national supply by a central bank.

The virtual world, as ever, proffers plenty of its own jargon. The new edition has finally cottoned on to social media and microblogging. Slightly less quotidian is the phrase dictionary attack, which describes an attempt to gain illicit access to a computer system by using an enormous set of words to generate potential passwords. The new edition also dusts off and polishes a couple of terms – staycation (a holiday spent in one's home country), national treasure (someone or something regarded as emblematic of a nation's cultural heritage, normally Judi Dench or Stephen Fry) – that feel as though they have been in common usage for some while.

To balance them out among the 2,000 or so new items there are a few more left-field choices.

Among them are cheeseball, which refers to someone or something lacking taste, style or originality, and the more disturbing phenomenon of hikikomori, the Japanese word for the acute social withdrawal that occurs in some teenage boys.

MPs told to mind their language

By Sean Curran

Parliamentary Correspondent, BBC News

Could the expenses scandal turn out to be good news for the English language?

A group of MPs has been having a bit of end-of-term fun by talking about the sort of language used by politicians and civil servants.
To help their plain English party go with a swing they invited along some star witnesses: Matthew Parris from The Times, The Guardian's political sketch-writer Simon Hoggart and Professor David Crystal, a linguistics expert from Bangor University.

Everyone agreed that a lot of political speeches are gobbledygook, full of words and phrases like "stakeholder", "multi-agency", "level playing field", "outsourcing" and "blue-sky thinking".
I could go on but that's part of the problem. Politicians do go on and on and on, inventing more and more gibberish.

David Crystal pointed out: "politicians could not be accused of lying if nobody understood what they had said".

'Delivery's out, implementation'a in': The civil servant's essential guide to Davespeak

By Mail On Sunday

If you want to make it in the new Government, you need to know the lingo. So civil servants have produced a guide to ‘speaking Cameron’ to help its employees adjust to life under the Coalition. The briefing note, drafted by officials in Michael Gove’s Education Department – but expected to be emulated across Whitehall departments – is headlined ‘language of the new Government’. The memo – drawn up for the benefit of outside agencies hired to work for the department – is divided into two columns: words used before May 11 (the day Mr Cameron entered No 10) and those which should be adopted instead. The first word which the memo says should be dropped is ‘State’. The officials write that it should be substituted for Mr Cameron’s cherished concept of the Big Society, his idea that power should be taken away from Government and handed back to communities. The concept, which is thought to have been driven by Mr Cameron’s long-term image guru Steve Hilton, can be felt throughout the list: civil servants should not talk about ‘leading change’ but about ‘empowering change’, it says. The 30 key ‘translations’ include several mentions of families, another key part of the PM’s ‘brand’. More...Shire wars: Cameron risks new 'Turnip Taliban' rebellion with secret plan to drive out old-style constituency chairmen. The guide says that the emphasis is no longer on England being ‘the best place in the world to grow up’, but should be on Britain being ‘the most family-friendly place in Europe’. The list, which is subject to the caveat that it ‘depends on the context the words are used in’, spells the end for much of the jargon which sprang up during New Labour’s 13 years in power. ‘Stakeholder’, meaning someone with an interest in a policy, has been abolished, to be replaced with ‘people, volunteers, practitioners, professional organisations etc’, while ‘delivery model’ has been axed in favour of ‘getting things done’. The term ‘integrated working’ has been replaced by the more verbose, but comprehensible, ‘people working together to provide better services’. Last night, a Government spokesman said the guide was a natural consequence of the change of regime. ‘All new governments have new policies, which they communicate to the public with fresh language and tone,’ said the spokesman. ‘It will come as no surprise that we’ve been working on this.’

Linguistics: Speaking of Space

published on: Time

America's leap into space has stimulated science and spawned new industries. It has also created a new idiom: space-speak. Many a scientist finds the growing, and sometimes incomprehensible jargon essential to the simplest conversation about new devices and techniques. But many a layman has become convinced that it is only one more irritating and unnecessary obstacle looming between him and a better grasp of scientific accomplishment. In a detailed analysis of space-speak for the magazine Science, University of Michigan Psychologist David McNeill suggests that there is something to be said for both points of view.
Creativity Limitation. Such space-speak metaphors as "umbilical" (the cord connecting a space-walking astronaut to his craft) and "milk stool" (the arrangement of a missile's three rocket engines) are vital additions to the language, says McNeill. He is equally impressed by such metonyms as "eyeballs in" and "eyeballs out" (describing extreme conditions of acceleration and deceleration, respectively), and he approves of neologisms such as "rockoon" (a rocket launched from a balloon). Unfortunately, metaphors, metonyms and neologisms—and the creativity required to invent them—are limited. They constitute only about one-eighth of the entries in official NASA diction aries of space terms.
Most of the remaining space jargon, according to McNeill's analysis, is made up of "nominal compounds"—words strung together endlessly in what scientists consider a logical order to describe complex devices or systems. Controlling the attitude of a ship by ejecting gas through nozzles, for instance, is called "nozzle gas ejection ship attitude control." The longest nominal compound discovered by McNeill appeared in the Congressional Record, and sounded as if it had been translated literally from the German: "liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen rocket powered single stage to orbit reversible boost system."
Such unwieldy compounds, McNeill says, constitute 19% of all the words in written NASA reports—substantially more than he found, for example, in papers by psychologists (8%) or in articles by educators (3%). But they are also used extensively by non-space scientists, "apparently to meet the common need for technical terms in greater numbers than metaphors, metonyms or neologisms can supply."
Possessive Pretension. On the other hand, McNeill stresses, the compound is often used to extremes, especially by those who pretend to possess a degree of technical knowledge that they do not have. Establishing a "pretension index" based on the length of nominal compounds and their frequency of use, he discovered that in their speeches, members of Congress were even more compound-conscious than NASA engineers. A space-technology magazine was a worse offender. It printed 300% more six-word compounds than did written NASA reports.
Even the engineering mind has begun to boggle at the profusion of space-speak—which explains the reduction of some complex nominal compounds to straightforward acronyms. "Augmented target docking adapter" has become ATDA, "astronaut maneuvering unit" is known as AMU, and the "electronic ground automatic destruct sequencer" —used to blow up missiles that have gone astray—is known simply as EGADS.
More detailed study of space-age jargon would be beneficial, McNeill feels, and his report must be considered only preliminary. "But we can conclude," he says, "that the following statement is probably true: Space-speak is an engineering technology concept expression manuscript sentence grammar device."

Jargon, Buzzwords and other Bad Biz Writing

By Ilya Leybovich

Here we look at the worst examples of office-speak, along with some words that deserve a place in our professional vocabulary. Not all corporate buzzwords are without their usefulness.
Everyone has encountered business jargon at one time or another. Whether hearing them from your boss, coworkers or customers, buzzwords can be a major source of irritation, obscuring rather than clarifying someone's point. There are, however, some types of business lingo that can aid in effective communication. Knowing the difference between helpful business language and the kind that should be banned is an increasingly vital skill in today's communication-driven workplace.
"When we talk about business jargon, we are generally referring to one of two things — words that are peculiar to a trade or words that are pretentious, unintelligible or gibberish," small business advisory Flying Solo explains. "And sometimes we can experience a spectacular combination of the two."
Despite its negative reputation, business jargon continues to proliferate, perhaps because those who use it don't recognize it as jargon or because they have become habituated to the quality of communication in their work environment. Either way, research shows that professionals across the board dislike office-speak.
A mid-2009 survey from staffing firm Accountemps identified the most irritating business buzzwords and phrases based on responses from 150 senior executives at major United States firms.
Here are the top 10 from the findings and their supposed meanings:

Leverage: To use something. According to the jargon dictionary from theOfficeLife.com, "A list of the worst business jargon would, of course, be incomplete without it."

Reach out: To make contact. This is "a dramatic way of saying a very mundane thing."

It is what it is: There's nothing we can do about it. As in, "The server is down today, and clients are irate. It is what it is."

Viral: Popular and spreading. As in, "Our video has gone viral."

Game changer: "A sports term describing a critical point with the potential to alter the overall outcome."

Disconnect: An inconsistency. As in, "There is a disconnect between what the consumer wants and what the product provides."

Value-add: As in, "We have to evaluate the value-add of this activity before we spend more on it." It's a "typical biz-speak reversal of 'added value."

Circle back: To return. As in, "I'm heading out of the office now, but I will circle back with you later."

Socialize: To reconcile. As in, "We need to socialize this concept with our key stakeholders."

Interface: A complicated way of saying "communicate." As in, "My job requires me to interface with all levels of the organization."

Unfortunately, these types of business jargon aren't isolated to conversation. In fact, they have a tendency to make it into work e-mail, memos and reports, reducing the general quality of business writing.
"Unfortunately, years of language dilution by lawyers, marketers, executives and HR departments have turned the powerful, descriptive sentence into an empty vessel optimized for buzzwords, jargon and vapid expressions," Inc.com explains. "Words are treated as filler — 'stuff' that takes up space on a page."
However, not all business terminology is stale and tired. A separate article from Inc.com lists some original buzzwords that might actually improve the quality of communications:

Big hairy audacious goal: The use of humor makes this more memorable than most goal-related phrases, and hyperbole provides some motivation.

Frictionless: A highly descriptive term that visualizes how business processes should run.

Knowledge worker: Emphasizes the mental contributions of certain employees rather than just their profitability.

Management by walking around: This is a humble and vivid description of good leadership.

Angel: "What better metaphor for the answer to an entrepreneur's prayers?" Inc.com asks.

Just in time: This phrase evokes both resourcefulness and efficiency in work processes.

Decoding The Latest Business Buzzwords

published on: cbsnews

MarketWatch's Marshall Loeb Translates Some Of The Latest Conference Room Lingo
(MarketWatch) Buzzwords have always been a part of the business lexicon. But just like street slang, the language of business changes. For instance, today's business words are heavily influenced by the technological times we live in.

From Megan Aemmer of MSN Encarta, here are some popular buzzwords to help you decode the jargon of today's business world:

Offline: You speak to someone offline when you need to talk with them in person or one on one on the phone rather than via email or instant message. It can surface in a meeting or conference call, when some sensitive or long-winded issue comes up that can be discussed more privately or efficiently without the group. "Let's take that offline, after the meeting."

Ping. Also Pinging: If you need to get someone's attention, you "ping" them, usually via email or instant message. Before the Internet, ping was used to describe the sound of a submarine's sonar. "When you get the chance, ping him for his contact information."

Deep Dive: When someone asks you to do a deep dive, they're asking for more in-depth information. This pops up frequently in research or consulting services. The phrase "drill down" can also be used in a similar context. "We did a deep dive of that telecom company, but we still need to drill down on their margins."

Bandwidth: In computer science, digital bandwidth refers to the capacity of the system to transfer data over a connection. But in the world of business jargon, bandwidth refers to a person's available time to complete a task. "My bandwidth is getting too sapped by the January report" or "I don't have the bandwidth to work on another report right now."

iPad terminology

Sunset, verb. To be in the process of becoming obsolete; a "sunsetting device". (Cf. the already well established and uncommonly ugly legacy, adjective: already obsolete; a "legacy computer")

Readcast, verb. To read something while similarly transmitting on several social media the fact that you are reading it and what you think of it.

Vook, noun. A book composed of both video and text; also, the name of the company that invented the vook for the iPad.

Swype, verb. Allows users to glide a finger across the virtual keyboard to spell words, rather than tapping out each letter.


published on: Johnson

Read also:

Sunsetting and Readcasting

What is the difference between jargon and buzzword?

published on: Techrepublic

A buzzword is a popular moniker for a phenomenon, idea, or practice. Some buzzwords start out as clever or insightful metaphors, but by the time they’re called buzzwords, any metaphoric value has died; and yet, the word continues to be overused, and it therefore becomes part of the “buzz” about a topic — often more background noise than substance.
Buzzwords represent a subset of a larger phenomenon: words that are used for an effect that lies beyond their strict definitions. The most extreme example of the class is the word, which stretches the definition of the word word. It has no denotation of its own, but its meaning when used is “I’m thinking about what I want to say next, but I don’t want to yield the floor to anyone else in the meantime.”
Another word that relies mostly on meta-meaning is basically. At face value, the word basically denotes the fundamental nature of something, or a summarization. In practice, though, it says “I’m giving you the short version that isn’t very rigorous, so don’t raise any objections to my rule — and you can assume that I know more on the subject than you’re able to comprehend.”
Buzzwords serve a similar purpose; these words often act as a stand-in for a whole knowledge domain. When someone uses a buzzword in conversation, everyone involved is presumed to know what it means and everything behind it. More importantly, the hearers are expected to presume that the speaker knows everything about the subject. For instance, how many times have you heard “in the cloud” or “cloud-based solution” without any explanation being offered or requested?

Buzzwords differ from jargon.

Jargon is a collection of domain-specific terminology with precise, specialized meanings. When two people understand the same jargon, they can communicate on that subject more efficiently. Buzzwords, on the other hand, over-generalize a subject in an attempt to make the speaker’s content appear more significant than it is. Buzzwords provide the same function in conversation that raising the hackles serves in animal encounters: They’re a fake display of greatness, and they’re often born of the same kind of fears.