Factory-farm words

Read a pile of technology marketing and you quickly assume that you’re alone among those who despise many of the words you keep hearing. They’re words like optimize, leverage, synergy, and utilize. People in this industry don’t really talk like that, do they?

Many don’t, at least not in private, and they don’t tweet like that, either. One tweet trail at Gartner BI Summit complained about exactly this kind of word — these miserable words with all the wild flavor bred out of them like factory-farm tomatoes.

On the list of suggested extinction, Jill Dychè listed optimize and fact-based. Scott Davis listed leverage, co-optition, and dot-bomb. Someone also threw in win-win, synergy, and the lovely utilize.

Mark Madsen cautioned that banning all those words would leave… 

Read a pile of technology marketing and you quickly assume that you’re alone among those who despise many of the words you keep hearing. They’re words like optimize, leverage, synergy, and utilize. People in this industry don’t really talk like that, do they?

Many don’t, at least not in private, and they don’t tweet like that, either. One tweet trail at Gartner BI Summit complained about exactly this kind of word — these miserable words with all the wild flavor bred out of them like factory-farm tomatoes.

On the list of suggested extinction, Jill Dychè listed optimize and fact-based. Scott Davis listed leverage, co-optition, and dot-bomb. Someone also threw in win-win, synergy, and the lovely utilize.

Mark Madsen cautioned that banning all those words would leave marketing with nothing but proper names and prepositions.

The whole discussion started off when Dychè posted a link to David Silverman’s article in Harvard Business “10 Business Words to Ban.”

Now Dave Wells has followed with a weblog post. He left the TDWI conference in Las Vegas last week with his head “afloat in buzzwords.” So many new terms every quarter, and so much ambiguity. ” Maybe its time that we define our terms and differentiate between similar sounding terms.” He goes on to list a few he’d like to see on the endangered list.

Let the movement flourish.

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