Reader Daniel Nitsche suggests checking out this lecture by Don Watson (MP4 file: 139MB / 41 minutes) on the absurdity of corporate speak.
There are some great points in there, sprinkled with humour.
Powerpoint is the ultimate in the depletion of English. It just doesn’t approve of sentences. It makes them into dot points. On politicians: we’re now more interested in the questions being asked by the interviewer because we know the interviewee won’t answer the questions anyway. On private organisation speak: “Dear Valued Customer”—would you write to your mother that way? (Dear Valued Mother). The invention of a mission statement is too late. The worst companies in the world are using mission statements.
Fun example from the lecture: Someone wrote a letter to Watson’s 90 year old mother that began “Dear Applicant.” Unclear what it was all about, she passed the letter to him. He wound up responding with a letter that started “Dear Bureaucrat.”
Here’s an interview with Watson.
The language I think is poisoned, generally. And it’s poisoned in the name of efficiency for some strange reason. It’s as if the whole culture has been corporatised in one way or another. Does it really matter? Well I think it does. I think language is how we know each other. Speak that I may see thee.
Therefore … I mean, If you talk like this to your friend down the pub you won’t see him there next week.
Watson’s Weasel Words site collects awful yet funny examples of managerial language. Why Weasel Words?
‘In 1916 Theodore Roosevelt declared that the ‘tendency to use what have been called weasel words was “one of the defects of our nation”.’ ‘You can have universal training or you can have voluntary training, but when you use the word “voluntary” to qualify the word “universal”, you are using a weasel word,’ he said: ‘it has sucked all the meaning out of “universal”.’
Words that suck all the meaning out. Good way to put it.
It’s all a reminder to give anything you write a decent bullshit test before sending it out. Would you ever talk to your mother or your friend that way? If not, why is it ok to talk to a customer that way?
Jeremy at MicroExperience
on 11 Jan 10This discussion is spot-on. When I receive an email from a company, and it starts with “Dear Customer” or “Dear CUSTOMERNAME” (mail merge gone wrong!), that’s a big red flag about where their priorities are. Either figure out a way to put people’s names in the message, or don’t have a name field at all.
On a similar note, consider the disconnect between the typical message from a customer, and the typical response from the company. The customer submits a detailed tech support question or request for product info, and then gets a canned response beginning with “Dear Customer”. If that’s how a company starts off each message, it sets a distant and negative tone for the rest of the interaction.
tomslee
on 11 Jan 10So the knock-down of Powerpoint is written as a bulleted list? Intended irony I hope.
Zach
on 11 Jan 10@tomslee
HAhahahahahAHHAAHHAHAhahahHAHAHAHAHAHahahhahahahaa!!!!!!!1
AK
on 11 Jan 10Some good points. Is there a link for those of us without iTunes?
eCarl
on 11 Jan 10Nice post
Brett
on 11 Jan 10I received a “Dear Valued Vodacom Customer, Happy Birthday” text message on my recent birthday. Am I supposed to feel good that a completely automated process sent me generic well-wishes on my birthday? Is it supposed to make my day? Do I immediately think that my service provider is special and they’re thinking about me? Really, it just annoyed me!
rick
on 11 Jan 10There’s a line on both sides. You wouldn’t reply to your customers with something like “Hey scro, quit being a wuss and just upgrade to Chrome. IE blows!”
Tony
on 11 Jan 10The web is riddled with this kind of speak. Might as well be Lorem Ipsum.
@rick – I completely agree. I recently decided not to use a web-based service because the email it would have sent out to my users had wording that was way too informal. Attempts at being hip can devolve into immaturity.
Jake
on 11 Jan 101) It’s not just corporations that are infected with bizarre, English-like language; government has the same problem, and perhaps worse, and I describe one example of it here regarding a social service request for proposals.
2) If it were in my power, I’d assign the Powerpointers and so forth to read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, which noticed tendencies not dissimilar to those here—only more than 60 years ago. Something about modernity seems to bring with it linguistic torture.
Martial
on 11 Jan 10I received a hand-written holiday card from Bee Docs – that made no assumptions about my religion or lack thereof. Made me wish they had more than one product, but did get me to read their latest blog posts.
Peregrine Solus
on 11 Jan 10“•Powerpoint is the ultimate in the depletion of English. It just doesn’t approve of sentences. It makes them into dot points.”
PowerPoint has never disapproved of any of the sentences that I have written.
Nor has PowerPoint made any of the sentences that I have written into dot points.
Someone out there must have a very rogue version of PowerPoint.
Dan Grossman
on 11 Jan 10Reminds me of Microsoft’s unique internal language that sometimes leaks out into their job postings.
TC
on 12 Jan 10Quick time version here for those of use without itunes.
James Devlin
on 12 Jan 10I like David Foster Wallace’s denouncement:
“The truth is that most US academic prose is appalling – pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipidelian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jardon-riden, empty: resplendently dead.”
Wayne Austin
on 12 Jan 10Great article, I can relate to alot of it, I’m sure we all can, though Private Organisation speak got me thinking: as naff as “dear valued customer” (etc etc) sounds what other alternatives?
1. Employ people to write personalized emails to every single customer. Not exactly economical.
2. My alternative would be to replace these weasel words with gathered customer data, so “valued customer” is replaced with “Don” or “Don Watson” if you prefer, which may look great, but in reality its exactly the same machine sending it, just with a little more knowledge.
I think at the end of the day I am not entirely bothered about how the message refers to me as, I care about how the information the message is about is presented to me, which would be – get to the point, and be quick about it.
AK
on 12 Jan 10@TC, @Matt
Thanks for the links!
Matt Puchlerz
on 12 Jan 10One of the worse abuses of corporate speak, in my mind, is the overuse of the word “solution.” Everyone provides solutions. Sure, it works on a sensical and grammatically-correct level, but rarely is it paired with any meaningful language or descriptive context.
As such, I decided to create a single-serving site to log the rampant absurdity: Solutions Per Hour. Have it open on your mobile as you struggle through grueling corporate meetings.
mattbg
on 14 Jan 10Reminds me of that line from the Ricky Gervais podcast, where Karl Pilkington gets the letter from a business, beginning with “Dear Mr K. Dilkington” and proceeds to tell him that he is one of their most valuable customers :)
Gebze Emlak
on 15 Jan 10There’s a line on both sides. You wouldn’t reply to your customers with something like “Hey scro, quit being a wuss and just upgrade to Chrome. IE blows!”
This discussion is closed.