Every industry has its alphabet soup of acronyms and linguistic idiosyncracies.  But if the you’ve ever felt like the jargon of work has jumped the vernacular shark, you might be ready to do a little buzzword BuzzWhacking.  To what has become a favorite annual tradition, we now submit this 2009 edition, inspired by the editors of and contributors to www.buzzwhack.com, a site devoted to demystifying bad business buzzwords.  If you can put a string of these together with a straight face, the humor may be a little lost on you…

Our favorite Bad Buzzwords of the Year (likely proliferating in a cubicle near you) and their definitions, borrowed with appreciation…

  • Relanguage:  Term used by $300-an-hour consultants when $5 words, such as reword, rephrase or rewrite, would work just as well, i.e. "I think we can relanguage that to be more effective."
     

  • Disambiguate: To remove ambiguities. To make clear.  (Ironic, yes)?  Apparently used extensively by software developers, as in: "Before we go gold, we need to disambiguate the help menu verbiage." 
     

  • Centergistic: Focusing on one main goal or purpose. "We need to keep this meeting centergistic if we’re going to make our deadline."
     

  • Telephonically communicated: To convey information or data by telephone. "The results of the retest were telephonically communicated to the CEO."  A less buzzy alternative: "I called Jack."
     

  • Leveraging knowledge capital:  Stealing someone else’s work or idea (program code, presentation, etc.) and then changing a few things to make it your own.
     

  • Prepone: To move forward in time. The opposite of postpone. "The Wednesday meeting has been preponed to Tuesday."
     

  • Budgetunity: An "opportunity" for innovative budgeting, such as: "The shortfall in revenue has given the governor a budgetunity."  (So that’s how all our economic trouble started).
     

  • Climate sensing: A random survey of workforce attitudes. Generally done by walking around and chatting with the employees. Also known as "taking the pulse."
     

  • Conversate: To have a conversation. Created by those who (for some bizarre reason) don’t think "converse" or "talk" are adequate.
     

And a few that were created with the clear intent of being uttered tongue-in-cheek…

  • BFO: Blinding Flash of the Obvious. "Jack is having another one of his BFO moments."
     

  • Blamestorming: A group process where participants analyze a failed project and look for scapegoats other than themselves.
     

  • Innovicide:  (Loving this one) To kill a new idea. "Jack‘s concept was brilliant, but management committed innovicide again."
     

  • PowerPoint Singalong: A presentation read verbatim from the slides, without extemporaneous observations, notes, comments or asides of any kinds.  Monotone delivery optional.
     

  • Reverse Telecommuting:  The act of bringing things to work that you should do at home, i.e. calling friends on the phone, selling your stuff on eBay etc.
     

  • Blahger: A blogger whose message primarily consists of blah-blah-blah. (You’ll tell us if that’s how we ever start to sound, right)?

 

Have a comment on or favorite of the buzzwords above?  Post it and tell us (or share your own nominations).