Beyond the buzz

My brain took a beating all of last week. I do not mean that somebody bashed my head in, but it might well have happened that way. The culprit here was an overdose of buzzwords.

Well, struggling with my ongoing education homework, I was clearly told by a group of my peers that unless I got all the management buzzwords into my final report I probably wouldn’t make a good impression.

Hoping to learn something new, I got on to the World Wide Web.

Some research and quite a few conversations with colleagues and trusted friends later I came to my "un-cool" conclusion that buzzwords have been made cool (read pretentious) by young techies and management graduates to create an underclass and obscure the truth.

In my time (when I was younger that is), it was called "euphemism", because it was then not appropriate in polite society to call a spade a spade.

When the class system did exist, the so-called upper classes took it upon themselves to create a buzzword language of their own so they could look down their noses at the working class.

However, since colonised nations became republics, the working class hero was glorified, posh became redundant and money became the yardstick for class; young educated people aspiring to a better life (read broke) had to find a way to feel special and created a language of their own to the exclusion of others.

I found an interesting website, www.johnsmurf.com, that defines a buzzword as: "A word or phrase connected with a specialised field or group that usually sounds important or technical and is used primarily to impress laypersons".

The site actually explained what "Bring it to the table" meant. When I first heard it, I was flummoxed, because all I bring to my table are my dinner guests and food. However, I found it actually means, "Let’s get blunt here".

If like me, you need a real education in the cool, must-have words, the site has an A-Z idiot-proof list with full explanations.

There is also a dictionary of management jargon at www.geocities.com to help aspiring lesser-beings become a member of the trendy "Jingo Club".

I found it eye-opening. You may do so too.

Nirmala Janssen
Editor@alnisrmedia.com

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