Ethan Allen No Longer Makes Furniture 0
According to the van I saw today, it now makes “Home Interiors.”
Which reminded me of Andrew Cassel’s column about John Walston’s The Buzzword Dictionary:
Information architect: A librarian.
Director of first impressions: A receptionist.
Insourcing: The opposite of outsourcing – e.g., you fired the cleaning service and now sweep up the shop yourself.
Up-titling: Giving important-sounding names to jobs such as those above.
Negative profit: A loss.
Marital rupture: A divorce.
Negative patient outcome: Call the undertaker.
Monetize: Getting paid, as in “we monetize our intellectual capital” when you pay for our advice.
Mission-critical: As Walston puts it, “another sign that too many people have read too many Tom Clancy books. What was wrong with ‘essential’?”
Percussive maintenance: “Whacking the heck out of something to get it running again.”
Prebuttal: A preemptive rebuttal. Something the opposition party does days before the president’s State of the Union speech.
Then there are the nouns that have been verb-ed: “Efforting,” “dialoguing,” “actioning,” “potentialize,” “proceduralize,” “operationalize.”
And words that were jazzed up during the tech boom: “E-tainment,” “e-marketing,” “e-cubation,” “dot-corp,” “B2B,” “P2P,” “E2E.”
I’m adding Walston’s site to my links. It should be useful in decoding statements by politicians and business executives, especially statements made when they are trying to cover up something.
