Buzzwords - Innocent or Lethal?

I'm not a huge fan of buzzwords. Marketing people seem to be not only the first to coin them and plow them into the ground through insane repetition but also the first to decry them.

Secretly I think that's part of the pleasure - to be the first kid on the block to use a phrase just becoming popular, then with correct and timely usage display how one is extremely au courant with its correctness and then, (oh and timing is so important here) refer to the phrase but always place it in "air quotes"; this shows just the right amount of insider knowledge plus a soupcon of indifference intended to display sophistication and mastery yet often falling very short of the mark. Yet another example of where life doesn't deviate much from junior high (amazing the examples I'm piling up out of this theory).

Most of the time I think marketing people love the buzzwords because they don't really enjoy words and are relieved to have something, anything, to say - people who write and read incessantly, prose as well as poetry, seem to have less use for buzzwords because they don't rely only on them to get their points across.

Compose a random sampling of one's fellowman and ask them the question of which buzzwords or corporate phraseology is akin to psychic fingernails screeching down a blackboard and their lists will come tumbling forth, a spate of jumbled nonsense that the supremely earnest will still use, quite earnestly, but that the businessperson with a more fine-tuned ear will reject as quite immediately unlovely and will balk from ever using.

I will not post my own List of Shame - not only will you find your very own detestable phrase, likely #5987 on my list, but you could probably do one better. (Frankly, I doubt there is enough bandwidth to encapsulate. Better to exort my wee and very opinionated group of readers to imagine their own most reviled.)

Yet - oh brave new world, that has such people in it! (And good old Orwell is likely tumbling mightily in his grave lately, if one bases dead author movement on the number of folks who are referencing his very dystopian yet quite readable novel, while he's probably cursing fair Will Shakes for putting the words into Miranda's mouth in the first place and wondering why the hell he chose that quote above others.)

I suppose it's good news that there will always be buzzwords to deplore - and fun for those of us that keep clandestine lists of Things Which Ping The Pet Peeve Monitor.

The latest in the category of buzzwordery gone awry is something I actually read about just today in a new media trade magazine and Googled tonight so I can properly link (God bless Google - we just don't say it enough, do we):

Just a Thought - Death to User Generated Context

Go check out what he says. I agree with blogger Adam (although I don't know him from the original, and probably wouldn't have chanced upon his words without reading the article).***

There are scads of quite lovely, intriguing, thought-provoking, button-pushing ideas, writing, photography, reviews, video, short films and essays out there in the world, gushing out of their creator's minds quite freely, creatively, and completely without the assistance of a single buzzword.

Flowering quite without the benefit or blessing of either a corporation or a marketing mind. Makes one think, doesn't it?


***And Adam, if I could figure out how to trackback you'd see it, but since I've just figured out linking don't hold your breath, m'kay?