Weasel words and the absurdity of corporate speak | Hacker News Reader

Weasel words and the absurdity of corporate speak

37signals.com

43 pointsmrduncan20 comments

> 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?

I would assume - hope! - that the relationships of company representatives to their customers is not the same as their relationships to their mothers and friends. I don't want companies with which I do business to pretend to some kind of familial or fraternal bond that doesn't really exist.

The language of phony familiarity ("Hey, Ryan!") seems to me to be even more weaselly than the language of business relationships (i.e. "Dear Valued Customer"), which is at least honest in its mercenary intent.

If taken that far, I agree. I think there is a good middle ground though where you don't sound phony - what about just addressing someone by their first name?

Depends on the culture. I guess in the US this is OK. In Germany most people opt for the equivalent of Mr Last-Name for customers.

How about "Dear Mr. McGreal:"?

I think most companies can handle a mail merge.

"Dear Mr. McGreal" would be great - but I'd be worried if my mother or friends started addressing me that way. :)

My Mom would only resort to formal salutations when she noticed that some household device was now behaving somewhat, um, different.

Even that is a bit dishonest. I'm not 'dear' to my bank.

What should they say? (disregarding that prepending a salutation of "Dear" is a matter of English etiquette, and some customers may be offended if you do not include it.)

The Russians had this right, you could call anyone Comrade in almost any context and it was fine.

I think the more reasonable standard might be this: if you wouldn't use a phrase or word in communication with your own colleagues, don't use it when talking to customers. If I got an email from a coworker talking about "synergies" and "visioning", I would likely reply with a direct and blunt request that they STFU and use real words.

That being said, having worked for a company which prepared business training materials for online MBA programs, I can tell you that the use of weasel words is literally part of the curriculum for any biz-school-trained managers. It's up to us, the somewhat-business-savvy geeks, to gently steer them back in the direction of real communication. (At the same time, we should probably listen when they tell us that "EPIC DATABASE FAIL!" is not actually a good way to describe what happened in an outage report.)

However "The database failed." might be a good description.

I know I probably don't represent the average user and not to invalidate your point in any way, but I would find it incredibly novel and entertaining to see an outage report describing the issue as an "EPIC DATABASE FAIL!"

I think "Valued Customer" is exceedingly, even bluntly, honest. I AM a valued customer - valued to an exact dollar amount.

In this case, the weasel word ends up saying the truth.

For a thoughtful critique of language used badly, I've always liked Politics and the English Language (http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.htm...)

Most of the points mentioned in the article misidentify the problem or give bad advice.

> Powerpoint is the ultimate in the depletion of English. It just doesn’t approve of sentences. It makes them into dot points.

When a few words do the work of a sentence, I would not call that 'depletion'.

> The invention of a mission statement is too late. The worst companies in the world are using mission statements.

Let's not do X. The worst companies in the world do X. X could be just about anything.

> 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.

Since the function of language is to convey meaning, language that is efficient is language that deftly conveys meaning, by definition. Assuming that all his complaints amount to wishing for language to be meaningful, it is a contradiction to say that efficiency is poisonous.

Excellent points.

To my mind, the biggest problem with corporate-speak (or legal-speak or academic-speak or political-speak for that matter) stems from the desire to sound self-important, which impulse tends to bloat the form of the expression and remove it from the sort of day-to-day tone in speech with which we are comfortable.

For good corporate communication, one can't normally go wrong using a professional tone coupled with language that is straight-forward, i.e., neither folksy nor pretentious. I don't know why so many people in this field get this wrong except that they are imbued with some sense that they have to come off as sounding self-important.

Really, weasel words can be kind of a gift. The company is unintentionally telling me what kind of people they are. If they can't be bothered to clearly state what they do and why they're great at it, they're telling me that I don't want to work with them.

I think that's a bit rough to be honest. I'm no fan of the corporate speak that has one browsing a site trying to work out exactly what it is the company really does (How do I install it? Do they host it? Does it go on my laptop or my phone? Can I afford it? ) but that copy is probably written by a small company trying to look bigger than they are (most entrepreneurs or freelancers can identify with that) or a mid-range marketing staffer not wanting to gamble on casual copy that might seem alien to the boss or customers.
I don't like it, but I can see how it comes to be.

A friend sent me a link yesterday to a site, some product or service that McDonalds were using. I browsed a few pages, skimmed the text, and had no idea what was even being sold - security software, social network, messaging system, it wasn't immediately obvious.

Well I was going to write something reminiscent to 'bird words' but while refreshing my memory of The First Circle, Google was completely washed out with links to "the bird is the word". wtf.

My favorite part of the linked video is, if I'm understanding him correctly, he uses the word "plague-ettes": as in, spreaders of the plague.

Sorry, I'm pretty sure he called them "plague rats".

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