The wilderness of “management speak”
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I don’t know whether anyone else shares my frustration with so-called “management speak”, where white-collar workers have developed a language of their own, made for making themselves feel more important, more cutting-edge and also for making hard terms easier to say.
A few of the phrases that come to mind are:
- Phone tag (calling one another, only to keep leaving voicemails, as a result of unanswered calls)
- Let (somebody) go – (fire (somebody))
- Touch base with (get in touch with)
- Connect with (get in touch with)
- Cascade (to disseminate information from the top down)
A BBC News Magazine article put it beautifully by asking people to contribute their love-to-hate office-speak phrases.
So do you have any of your own phrases that cause you to cringe? Or are you a fan of this subset of the English language?
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