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I once had to work with a consultant who was the most over the top bullshit artist I had ever seen in my life. Their line of work was getting "out of it" execs to feel like he understood the online world and getting paid to create nonsense launches.

I used to take notes and just try to capture the buzzword onslaught. Here's an old notepad cut-and-paste from a single 90 minute meeting this guy was in:

We should sidebar

I’ll call an audible and order lunch

So maybe we’ll put that into a live fire exercise

We’re elbow deep now

I’m starting to ladder into goals and tactics

Let’s explore this for a second so we can put it in the parking lot

Let’s take a bio-break

It’s not on the top of my want-to-do list

I want to get back to some more basic block and tackle

If you look at it as crawl, walk, run. I mean I hate that metaphor, but we’re transitioning from crawl to walk

I have some suggestions around merchandising homepage content

I’ve already done concepting

It’s analytics with icebreaking on the social side

I’ll type up outputs and share

We’re potentially opening the aperture on expert interviews

Out of this decision comes wayfinding for that decision

I’m looking for the exponential in this

Alright, I think we can land it

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spicybbq 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

At my company, nobody wants to have a meeting. They have a "level set", a "catchup", a "touchbase", or worse, a "touchpoint".

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Suppafly 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do you just hate business jargon and lingo in general? A lot of those phrases are useful and easily understood ways to describe processes. Most of them are fairly common in business and office contexts as well.

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CPLX 4 days ago | parent [-]

I don't hate jargon. I actually think jargon, as a concept, is clearly incredibly useful. When done right, you can take ordinary English words that people think they understand but we all don't agree on, and replace them with specific words only used in certain situations -- thus removing ambiguity about their meaning.

In such an instance that fact that normal people don't understand is kind of the point, you don't want people to think they understand when it's a specific or technical concept that has an agreed upon meaning, and they aren't yet familiar.

For example if I call something a "planning meeting" it's different then if I call it a "sprint meeting" as the latter isn't really used outside of a technical context and comes with a bunch of implicit assumptions about how the meeting will be structured and why it exists. While I could simplify it and call it a "planning meeting" in doing so I would actually lose clarity and specificity to those who are familiar with the jargon. Likewise someone unfamiliar might be prompted to figure out what that jargon means before showing up.

That's what jargon is for when used right. Then there's the other way to use it, which is to obscure or distract from the fact that the concepts being presented are too simple or obvious (or tangential) to be insightful at all, and the speaker has nothing to offer. The examples here were of someone doing the latter. Trust me, I was there.

	▲	Suppafly 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		>The examples here were of someone doing the latter. Most of those examples are totally normal, it's a bit of a stretch to have them all coming from one person, but they are hardly strange or incomprehensible.

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bluecheese452 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Let’s take a bio-break seems like the standard let’s take a restroom break in the area I live in.

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3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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wglb 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

“Were elbow deep now” sounds like Judy Blunt’s description of helping birth a calf in “Breaking Clean”