From Pine View Farm

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.

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