Oxford Dictionaries on Twitter @OxfordWords alerted me to the Guardian article, “10 of the Worst Examples of Management-Speak.” I love words, but sometimes the way they are used makes me cringe. Steven Poole has the same reaction because in his article, he “drills down into the strangled vocabulary of office jargon”:
1 Going forward is the “now-venerable way of saying ‘from now on’ or ‘in future.’”
2 Drill down “Far be it from me to suggest that managers prefer metaphors that evoke huge pieces of phallic machinery, but why else say ‘drill down’ when you just mean ‘look at in detail’?”
3 Action “can probably always be replaced with a more specific verb, such as ‘reply’ or ‘fulfil’, even if they sound less excitingly action-y. The less said of the mouth-full-of-pebbles construction ‘actionables’, the better.”
4 End of play “A manager who tells you to do something ‘by end of play’ – in other words, today – is trying to hypnotise you into thinking you are having fun. This is not a game of cricket.”
10 Sunset An imagistic verbing – “We’re going to sunset that project” – that sounds more humane and poetic than “cancel” or “kill.”
You can read numbers 5 to 9 can be found in the Guardian article, but I want to add one word that so many people use frequently either because they think it is correct or it sounds so much better than the word me: Myself is a reflexive pronoun, but it is used, incorrectly, in sentences that say, “If you have any questions, you may contact my assistant or myself.”