Circle the Wagons

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. We heard from John Dunn of Vista, California. He spent many years working as an analytical chemist for a major pharmaceutical corporation. And during the course of his career, he has heard so much corporate jargon that he was maybe in need of pharmaceuticals himself. It was really, really getting to him.

And so he wrote up his own version of minutes of a meeting. And it’s sort of this wonderful linguistic creed occur. And I just wanted to share it with you.

Oh, boy. This is one of the things where they pile on all this jargon all together in one.

Yeah, yeah. And this one is just particularly choice, I think. So here are his minutes from one of those meetings.

It is what it is. So let’s all reach out and circle the wagons to realign no-nonsense core strategic management perspective in order to take ownership and close the loop to see the bottom line and to afford us rationale at any rate merely as a preference of choice, so to speak.

Consequently, and at this particular point in time, if you will, to touch base at the end of the day, moving forward to think green and outside of the box, needless to say, as it were.

You’re killing me. Stop.

Wait, there’s more. With regard to culture in and of itself having a proactive stance. Additionally, in capturing the cost-benefit quality value added by our new paradigm, so called in retrospect to optimize win-win priorities and take us to the next level while facilitating fiscal responsibility and scaling cross-functional teaming to bring awareness and spell this out in context per se.

In conclusion, are there any questions?

Oh, no. The linguist in me says there’s a place in time for all of that jargon. I’m sure it does a job. But the human in me says.

The ninth circle of hell.

Yeah. You’ve shipped me bare and rubbed salt in the wound and then made me walk for the remedy. It’s terrible.

It’s so terrible that it’s good. I mean.

Yeah, no, maybe not. And it does make sense if you have a lexicon, you know, that you can sit there and translate.

I mean, grammatically. Yeah, yeah. It all makes sense. But I just love the way that this is like a last-ditch creed cur. I think I have an antidote to it.

Make them stop. Have you ever seen the video of Robert Benchley doing the Treasurer’s Report? Robert Benchley, the writer for The New Yorker, funny, funny guy, part of like this smart set in the 1930s in New York, used to do this skit.

It was finally recorded on video where he pretended to be the fill-in speaker for one of these academic organizations or a society of some kind. And he does a lot of this, like, not really understanding what’s going on. And eventually it kind of comes out that funds have been absconded with.

It’s dry, dry, dry. It’s a lot like this in terms of, like, the tone and the content. But maybe it’s the correct antidote to this.

Oh, that’s pretty funny. It’s the unicorn chaser to this poison that you put on the air.

It is poison. And since you mentioned that, I will say that I have tried to purge the phrase circle the wagons from my language ever since learning from some Native American folks that they find that offensive.

Oh, do they?

Yeah. I didn’t know that. How about that?

There we go. I’ll have to do that too.

Yeah. 877-929-9673. If you’ve got business jargon to share, yeah, maybe just keep it to yourself.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.