Here’s a good one culled from the day’s proofreading work: in a document discussing the “personal journal” feature of a wireless handheld, a copywriter for my agency spelled “journal” as “jernal.” Incidentally, the copywriters are all supposed to be college-educated, and they’re probably making more money than I am. Oy.
It doesn’t exactly qualify as “Egregious Corporate Speak” but it’s pretty egregious on its own terms…
So, as long as I’m complaining about copy errors that makes me want to reach for a cocktail, it’s probably a good time for another in our on-going series that I like to call Egregious Examples of IT Industry Corporate-Speak. This one illustrates my biggest personal pet peeve as a copy writer, proofreader, and editor, namely the repurposing of nouns into verbs. (Is “repurposing” yet another example? Hmm… could be… might have to look that up.)
Oh, this is rich: Johnny Carson’s former sidekick, Ed McMahon — whom Johnny often teased about his appetite for distilled beverages — has lent his name to a new brand of vodka, McMahon Perfect. Even the name just shouts out for one last jibe from the grave, doesn’t it? Quick, somebody call Jennifer Love Hewitt and see if she can contact Johnny on the other side!
This is turning into a regular feature here on Simple Tricks, isn’t it? I’m thinking I may have to start a sub-category for it. Anyhow, here’s today’s egregious turn of phrase, fresh out the warm, steaming interior of some copy writer’s PC:
Our consultants drive thought leadership in the security industry…
“Thought leadership?” What the heck is that? Sounds like it involves electrodes and clamps to hold your eyeballs open so you can’t look away from the product infomercials. Either that or it’s something Tom Cruise will be praising as the solution to everyone’s problems the next time he’s on Oprah…
Here’s another gem of a sentence from something I’ve been proofreading at work today:
The company’s growth initiatives rely on a “layer-and-leverage” strategy: layering new products and services onto a legacy infrastructure and leveraging the synergies that result.
“Leveraging the synergies?” Arg. That’s just… arg. There are times when I really hate working in the IT sector…
One of the drawbacks to getting paid for correcting spelling and grammar mistakes is that you become highly sensitized to how language is used (and misused) out there in the Real World. In other words, I find myself proofreading any copy I happen to encounter, even when I’m off the clock. These days, I automatically and unwillingly spot errors in restaurant menus, freeway signs, junk mail, smart-alecky t-shirts, captions on the TV news, and even professional publications that, in theory, ought to be paying someone to do the same work I do but frequently don’t appear to bother. It’s like I have some kind of lame-o superpower that I just can’t help but use. I’m reminded of the well-meaning but clueless mom in the first X-Men movie who asks her son, “Have you ever tried not being a mutant?” Well, yes, I have, with no luck. I can’t not see these things, even when I’d much rather be oblivious to them like everybody else.
I would like to officially register my undying hatred of the following inelegant buzzwords that I routinely see in the tech-sector marketing documents I proofread for my day job:
I don’t know what’s worse, having to read these crappy words and phrases or having to write them (I’ve done that, too, and it wasn’t pretty). But I do know I could happily live out the rest of my days without ever encountering any of them again…
This has been another mid-day grumble, courtesy of Simple Tricks and Nonsense.
I was probably typical of college English majors in that I imagined my life would be suffused with beautiful prose and urbane conversation. You know, that whole Dead Poets Society kind of vibe. Instead, I spend my days reading stuff like this:
Role-based access control empowers granular access to specific resources within an administrative domain.
I was going to say something sarcastic and pithy here at the end, but I find that words fail me. No doubt they’ve been sucked from my brain by the swirling black hole of aesthetic awfulness that is technical marketing language…
I earn my daily bread as a professional copy editor, among other things. That means I nitpick for cash, and just in case you’re wondering, no, there isn’t much cash to be made from picking nits. My slogan could be that immortal exchange from the Robert Redford film Sneakers:
Redford: “It’s a living.”
Woman: “Not a very good one.”
Anyway, doing this particular job has made me extremely sensitive to the general lack of correct grammatical usage that pervades our culture. I’m not talking about the way people speak, which is informal and colloquial by nature and thus not something I personally think is worth fretting over. I’m referring instead to the downright painful mistakes I constantly see on signs, menus, advertising, and the business documents I review — media that is professional in nature and should therefore adhere to the rules.
For some examples of the sort of thing that drives me crazy, check out this humorous collection of egregious errors that were observed along the boardwalk on Coney Island… which, as someone once pointed out, is not actually an island…
(Incidentally, the frequent misuse of the possessive apostrophe-s to make nouns plural is my greatest editorial pet peeve. It makes me say, “Arg.”)