I’ve done a lot of griping over the years about the “bizspeak” I encounter in the materials I proofread, weird stuff like “leverage” and “dialogue” used as verbs instead of nouns; weasel words designed to obfuscate unpleasantness, like “downsize” and “rightsize” instead of “layoffs”; and stuff that in any other context would just sound creepy, such as “thought leader.” (I can’t help it: whenever I read that one, I immediately picture some kind of mind-controlling alien monster from Doctor Who manipulating a bunch of zombie-slave humans.) I’ve always assumed the awfulness of this stuff was self-evident, but weirdly enough, I’ve found myself more than once trying to explain to others why it offends me so much. Many people don’t seem to mind it, and some even champion it, and nothing I’ve said on the subject ever seems to sway those poor misguided souls who’ve let The Man so thoroughly indoctrinate them with his mediocrity. Me being me, I naturally blame myself. My meager talents obviously haven’t been up to the task of articulating the deep cosmic wrongness of corporate jargon.

Perhaps all I need, though, is a little help from a fellow traveler, another true believer in just saying what you mean instead of trying to sound smart or cool or whatever it is these people are doing. Here’s one of Andrew Sullivan‘s readers from earlier today:

Whenever a colleague uses “deliverable” in my presence, I am seized
with a strong desire to bring the meeting to a shrieking halt and demand
an actual, specific description of the thing he expects to be
delivered.

Imagine if we used these sorts of meaningless, reflexive nouns to
describe all the objects in our lives.  This apple in my lunch?  It’s
actually just an eatable, just like everything else I consume today. 
I’m writing this sendable to you on a typeable.  When I’m done, I’ll
lean back in my sitable and use my thinkable to imagine a world that
doesn’t turn me into a suicideable.

Consultants use words like deliverable because it saves them the
trouble of actually explaining what they do, because the meat of our
work is so often complicated, imprecise, and poorly conceived.  This
problem, though, is precisely why consultants (and lawyers and other
people who traffic in ideas instead of concrete physical products)
should avoid vague, meaningless words.  If your goal on a project is
complicated and imprecise, your first step should be to think hard about
those goals, identify and name them.  When you rely on “action items”
and “deliverables” to get you to the end, you will most likely produce
something nearly as meaningless and useless as the words you’ve used to
describe its creation.

Amen, brother, whoever you are! (I regret that this writer was not identified in the blog entry I ganked his words from…)