My wife, Eileen, works in marketing for a manufacturing company. Lately, she’s been venting at home about all the jargon in the corporate world. Recently she’s taken up collecting the jargon terms that she feels are being overused. Her goal to fill a “buzzword bingo card.” So far here’s her list:

pushback
escalate
value add
talent management
intuitive
robust
enroll
leverage
gap-closing
showcase
point of pain

To which I would like to add, synergy, maturity, and driven. My wife is not alone, recently I found two sources debating all the jargon used in business. The first is at myragan where communicators and PR executives are discussing the need to use jargon for their clients, “internal” and “external” and among themselves. The second comes from one of my favorite resources on networking and brings up a great point, that with all this jargon in use, your “audience” or even your coworkers might not understand what you’re talking about. It comes from Steve Smolinsky and Kay Keenan at Conversation on Networking and their free email newsletter.

“Jargon Addendum: We are always so happy when readers take something we say and try it out, add to it, and, most importantly, send us the results. This story seems to be a great way to end this month’s issue so read on to the fine thoughts and great information from Jeanne Best:

“Jargon seems to be generational. I am working w/2 twentysomethings and managing them through the planning/execution of a convention of 400+ people. So the other day I was explaining the detailed spreadsheet one of them needed to set up to track materials and I said I know this is a lot of detail but we really need to have a major CYA – you know, cover your a__. The young man said yes to the assignment w/no expression so I asked him do you know what CYA is? He said no. So I explained it. The young woman in our office stopped in and I explained we have to keep this detailed info and that is was an exercise in CYA and I said do you know what it is? Her guess was Catholic Youth Association – made me feel bad to explain reality after all we had all just gone to see the Pope in D.C. but I said no cover your a__. So I learned a new lesson in communication.”

This is such a great example of assuming others know what you’re talking about. It’s another great reason to be clear, to keep away from jargon, to refuse to use abbreviations, to spell it out. Not only that, notice how clever Jeanne is. She actually did what we suggest: ask it they understand. And look what she found out. Thank you Jeanne. Now if you only knew about those little ¤¤ signs we like to use.”

So what jargon terms bug you the most? Let me know and help my wife fill out her bingo card.

Until next time, Tim